Thérèse Raquin. Эмиль Золя

      First performed at the Finborough Theatre: Tuesday, 25 March 2014.

       THÉRÈSE RAQUIN

      By Émile Zola

      Adaptation by Nona Shepphard

      Music by Craig Adams

      Book and Lyrics by Nona Shepphard

      The action takes place in late nineteenth-century Paris.

      The performance lasts approximately two hours.

      There will be one interval of fifteen minutes.

      Thanks to:

      Northern Stage – Set build

      Jonny Dixon Puppetry

      Darren Royston for help with choreography

      Dawn, Charlie, Megan and everyone at boom ents

      Xanthe, Lisa, Emily and everyone at Fourth Day PR

      House of Wolf

      Darren Bell Photography

      Wayne Eagles

      Leigh Thompson

      Lily Vickers

      Steven Paling

      Sonia Dorado

      Lucy Alexander

      Our patrons are respectfully reminded that, in this intimate theatre, any noise such as rustling programmes, talking or the ringing of mobile phones may distract the actors and your fellow audience-members.

      We regret there is no admittance or re-admittance to the auditorium whilst the performance is in progress.

       ZOLA AND THÉRÈSE RAQUIN

      When Thérèse Raquin was published in 1867, it caused rather a scandal. This violent, red-blooded story of adultery and murder among the lower orders shocked a middle-class readership accustomed to delicate psychological intrigue and veiled titillation, and conferred on Zola a quite undeserved reputation as a pornographer. But for the young man of twenty-seven vying to make a name for himself in the Parisian literary world, publicity of any kind was not to be spurned;…a number of years as a freelance literary and art critic for regional newspapers had given him a keen sense of polemical cut and thrust, as well as nourishing his pronounced talent for self-publicity, while a period of dire poverty in the early 1860’s had left him with a burning determination not to fail in his chosen profession.

      Thérèse Raquin was a runaway success: the first edition sold out in under four months. A year later, after one more ‘experimental’ novel (Madeline Ferat), Zola was already working on the monumental twenty-volume cycle Les Rougon-Maquart which was to dominate his life for the next fifteen years and for which he is now so justly celebrated.

      While it may have enjoyed a succés de scandale at the time, Thérèse Raquin has endured with subsequent generations for different reasons. A work of intense atmosphere and unremitting tension, it builds a compelling drama out of a minimal plot, few characters, and the most basic of human motivations, the sex drive, in its crudest form.

      For all its strong story-line and direct presentation, however, the book remains highly ambiguous and unsettling…. There is something distinctly disturbing about the way he draws his characters and the attitude he invites his readers to adopt towards them. Zola works hard to deny the reader two key privileges which centuries of increasingly refined psychological literature had accustomed him or her to enjoying as of right: those of identifying with the characters’ motives and feelings, and of judging their actions… Zola’s aim, – explained in a preface to the second edition, a landmark manifesto for Naturalism – was precisely to make a radical break with the prevailing literary norms of human interest and moral judgement, and to write an experimental work which would utterly undermine the novel’s dependence on conventional psychology.

      By permission of Oxford University Press

      from the Introduction of Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola, translated with an introduction and notes by Andrew Rothwell (2008)