At RWCMD |
| Welsh College of Music and Drama- Therese Raquin , Welsh College of Music and Drama (Caird Studio) , May 24, 2001 |
| The Welsh College of Music and Drama can sometimes offer the most interesting, innovative theatre in Cardiff - students they may be but inspired by a good director who is also a good teacher they can take risks and thrill audiences. Martin Houghton is one such - possibly the most exciting experienced director working in Wales today and whose productions really should be on our main stages. Therese Raquin, in the tiny upstairs studio space above the college’s Bute Theatre, is another of his electrifying versions of nineteenth-century classics that show his signature concern to explore character within the claustrophobic confines of bourgeois society. Zola’s novel was shocking in 1867, with its violent tale of adultery and murder and the shock value is still present, not just in the storyline but in the sexuality, more overt here than it could ever have been then, with a trembling Therese being undressed by her young female friend on her wedding night, Therese as the frustrated mistress touching herself in anticipation of making love with Laurent, Therese transformed from a wide-eyed, widespread-legs sensual being to a red-cheeked, wild-haired emotional wreck. Houghton and his young company (with Melissa Brown mesmeric as the eponymous neurotic erotic heroine and a charismatic but maybe too hunky Ben Joiner as Laurent) create a stifling atmosphere of decadence as they relentlessly crank up the intensity, making Pip Broughton’s distilled and stylised adaptation seem more like a Tennessee Williams drama than a milestone piece of French naturalism. And the production brings out Zola’s real concern, a social realism that did not simply expose the underbelly of polite society but which squarely laid the blame on the amorality, smugness, arrogance and materialism of the bourgeoisie. While the Raquins persist in their Thursday-night social routine of dominoes and madeleines, a seething tragedy is ignored as the lovers murder the husband and gradually disintegrate from guilt. One guest tells early on how on the way he crossed the road to avoid discovering why a crowd had gathered (there had been a particularly horrendous murder), his wilful ignorance of the reality of life typifying his petty middle-class insularity. The nemesis is that of a self-obsessed uncaring society not just of the self-obsessed Therese and Laurent. The postgraduate students started a little uncertainly on the opening night but by the end they had enaged us utterly in this harrowing high-octane study of individuals caught in the materialist web of society - a brave production, not just in its nudity and sexual explicitness, but in the sense of raw emotional exposure from the two leads. The rest of the cast also gained assurance as the night went on; by the end of the week, I suspect, we will be asking why the production cannot be seen by wider audiences. Good set, too, from Paul Rees. |
Reviewed by: David Adams |
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