Emile Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin, published in 1867, portrays an adulterous couple driven to murder the woman’s husband. It was, depending on your preferred critic, a success, a scandal, a triumph of scientific realism, a shambles of cheap pornography. It was not a bore. It was not a comedy.
So something has gone wrong with the Roundabout’s lugubrious and giggly adaptation, scripted by Helen Edmundson and directed by Evan Cabnet, which stars Keira Knightley as the haunted and yearning Thérèse. The play runs some two and a half hours and seems longer, its longueurs punctuated by occasional audience laughter.
The setting is 19th century France. (The painterly set and lighting are by Beowulf Boritt and Kevin Parham.) Orphaned Thérèse is a ward of her prim aunt (Judith Light) and the reluctant wife of her sickly cousin, Camille (Gabriel Ebert). When Camille uproots the family to Paris, Thérèse meets Laurent (Matt Ryan), a former painter and current lothario.
Laurent and Thérèse soon fall into a desperate sexual entanglement. Or at least that’s what the script suggests. The actual sex shown – no foreplay, five thrusts, breathless collapse – is not precisely beguiling. (Bizarrely, this is the second play in a row in which Cabnet insists on having women shagged atop the nearest bit of cabinetry.) These lovers murder Camille via rowboat, then suffer the damp and horrifying consequences.
Edmundson’s adaptation is often cinematic and Cabnet seems like he would rather be directing a film. Scenes fade in and out; far too many moments show Thérèse looking on languishingly. These are sequences built for a tight closeup, not a wide-angled stage.
Perhaps a camera would lend emotional variety and substance to Knightley’s performance. She was quite good in her last stage outing, The Children’s Hour, but seems oddly flat here, though predictably shapely in the period costuming and somehow charismatic for all her lack of affect. Thérèse says that living with her stultifying family makes her feel like “a pressed flower”. The unremarkable Ryan does not bring her to blossom.
The supporting cast fares better, with Light predictably elegant and composed, even after her character suffers a paralytic stroke, and Ebert wringing laughs from Camille’s bleating tyranny. His seductive words to his wife on their wedding night: “Now that we’re married, I could see your breasts if I wanted to. Or touch them.” Ah, romance.
But of course the play isn’t intended as romance. It’s a story of sexual obsession – a horror story, a ghost story, curdled realism that gives way to melodrama. Or it might, if terror and desire were actually present here, if the working out of the plot felt inevitable rather than merely dutiful.
“I’m so tired,” Thérèse says at the play’s end. “I’m so tired.”
She spoke for so many of us.
