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Thérèse Raquin: A Play
Thérèse Raquin tells the story of a young woman, unhappily married to her first cousin by an overbearing aunt who may seem to be well-intentioned but in many ways is deeply selfish. Therese's husband, Camille, is sickly and egocentric, and when the opportunity arises, Thérèse enters into a turbulent and sordidly passionate affair with one of Camille's friends, Laurent. In his preface, Zola explains that his goal in this novel was to "study temperaments and not characters" and he compares the novel to a scientific study. Because of this detached and scientific approach, Thérèse Raquin is considered an example of Naturalism. "... Zola allows no rest from the pervasive gloom and neither does Neal Bell in his ambitious, intelligent adaptation. Bell stimulates both our voyeurism and our moral sensibilities, and he honors Zola's exquisite sense of cultural detail ..." Carol Burbank, Chicago Reader
"Neal Bell's exciting new adaptation, from the novel, keeps the grit and erotic animality, but throws out the cumbersome apparatus, letting the sordid story breathe and compressing it into a series of tight, poetically written short scenes, using the grotesque tiny details to imply feelings and situations in vivid shorthand: Naturalism as haiku." -Michael Feingold, The Village Voice
"Naturalism and expressionism collide with shattering effectiveness in THÉRÈSE RAQUIN. Emile Zola's seminal work of naturalistic fiction caused an international scandal when published in 1867. Zola's blunt, unprettified representation of the most sordid elements of life infidelity, murder, madness and suicide seemed revolutionary in the context of his time. Especially remarkable was Zola's gritty portrayal of his eponymous central character Therese, a brilliantly radical departure from the simpering female prototypes of Victorian convention. Playwright Neal Bell's expressionistic adaptation of Zola's masterwork is both allusive and bold. Bell, who understands that less is more, tersely renders a psychological suspense story that keeps us on the edge of our seats." -F Kathleen Foley, The Los Angeles Times
"Neal Bell's exciting new adaptation, from the novel, keeps the grit and erotic animality, but throws out the cumbersome apparatus, letting the sordid story breathe and compressing it into a series of tight, poetically written short scenes, using the grotesque tiny details to imply feelings and situations in vivid shorthand: Naturalism as haiku." -Michael Feingold, The Village Voice
"Naturalism and expressionism collide with shattering effectiveness in THÉRÈSE RAQUIN. Emile Zola's seminal work of naturalistic fiction caused an international scandal when published in 1867. Zola's blunt, unprettified representation of the most sordid elements of life infidelity, murder, madness and suicide seemed revolutionary in the context of his time. Especially remarkable was Zola's gritty portrayal of his eponymous central character Therese, a brilliantly radical departure from the simpering female prototypes of Victorian convention. Playwright Neal Bell's expressionistic adaptation of Zola's masterwork is both allusive and bold. Bell, who understands that less is more, tersely renders a psychological suspense story that keeps us on the edge of our seats." -F Kathleen Foley, The Los Angeles Times
88 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1998
10 people want to read
About the author
Neal Bell
32 books4 followersNeal Bell is an American playwright and screenwriter. Bell has written such plays as the thriller Two Small Bodies, as well as co-writing the screenplay for the Two Small Bodies film adaptation.
Bell has written other plays such as On the Bum, Somewhere in the Pacific, Monster, Operation Midnight Climax, Therese Raquin and Spatter Pattern (Or, How I Got Away With It).
Bell has written other plays such as On the Bum, Somewhere in the Pacific, Monster, Operation Midnight Climax, Therese Raquin and Spatter Pattern (Or, How I Got Away With It).
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 8, 2023
If God is dead, can tragedy still exist?
Put less obtusely, can tragedy exist without the concept of providence? This may seem a strange way of opening a review of a play, but when it comes to appreciating much of 19th century theatre it is a useful guiding question. Since its conception in Athens, western tragedy has dealt with the inevitable fall of the noble to some kind of fated course. The Moirae draw out man’s life in red string, which has its set beginning and end, men are but playthings in the hands of capricious Gods. Oedipus and his prophetic fate; Orestes and his struggle with the furies; Pentheus against Dionysus; Prometheus bound. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that Harmartia—the axial machine of tragedy—is the word used both for a tragic fall and for Sin. As Sophocles said of tragedy: “In a tragedy, nothing is in doubt and everyone's destiny is known. […] he who kills is as innocent as he who gets killed: it's all a matter of what part you are playing. Tragedy is restful; and the reason is that hope, that foul deceitful thing, has no part in it.”
Fate and the stage share a strange relation, with the playwright themselves playing the part of a kind of God, who provides a providence to his or her characters through a scripted path, each arriving at an inevitable conclusion. So much of the pathos of theatre too is founded on this strange relation between character and author/audience—dramatic irony can only function when there is a gap between the knowledge of the audience and that of the character. And through that gap, humour, dread, sympathy, apathy, can be created. In fact, you could say that expectation is at the core of all theatre—looking at Aristotle’s devices, both reversal (Peripeteia) and revelation (Anagnorisis) rely on it. And one of the core forces of expectation, is fate.
This was perhaps a roundabout way to contextulise the initial question, which I hope now is more pointed: Without the conception of divinely ordained plan, can tragedy—the inevitable fall of a noble character in the face of fate—exist? In many ways, so much of realist theatre branches from this question, and consequentially the post-modern and absurd. It isn’t surprising that realism in the theatre arrived at particular foment of European intellectual history. The 19th century was the century of Darwin, of Freud, of Nietzsche, of Marx. It was a century born into a new world of economy and sociology, the century of the ‘new sciences’ and natural laws. Each sought to uncover the forces which guide the world, which define and confine human action. Each, you could say, were providing new forces to replace the divine hand of God. By the middle of the 19th century, God is dead, but plenty of new idols were raised in its place. And if there were new idols, then there were new ways to imagine human tragedy.
Though hardly a canonical text in world theatre, Emile Zola and his theatrical rendition of Therese Raquin articulates this transformational moment. You could say in relation to realist theatre ‘Zola is God, and Ibsen is his Prophet’. While Ibsen cemented Realism as the fiat accompi of the modern stage, it is Zola, and his clear vision of naturalist theatre, that defined the terms. Writing in a post-Darwinian world, Zola sought to square the circle of tragic fate in biological terms. People have set personalities and drives, genetically ordained; put in the right situation, these personalities will exist or clash mechanically, driving towards an inevitable outcome. Or, you could say, Fate. The tragedy of Therese Raquin is Zola’s exemplar of this naturalistic tragedy.
The Tragedy of Therese Raquin is one of naturalistic ‘necessity’. What happens when a bored, resentful housewife meets a philandering deadbeat don juan? What happens when the sickly husband stands in the way of the vital adulterer? What happens to a marriage cemented by the guilt of murder? Zola relies on the idea of inevitability of character to draw the audience into this tragedy of adultery, murder, guilt, and suicide—the table has been set, the billiard balls in place, the cue strikes the white ball, which ricochets into another, sinking it. It all unfolds mechanically.
In any work of this kind, dramaturgy is only half the question. The other half is whether the play is effective. Glibly, you could say that the characters in the play feel mechanical. But at the same time, it is a fairly penetrating criticism, as it points to an endemic flaw to Zola’s dramaturgy. In classical tragedies, our sympathy of the tragic hero is precisely in their struggle against fate, the distance between intention and destination. This is what invokes pity in the viewer. The Naturalistic approach instead makes this very internal intention ‘fate’, that intention is destination. The two leads in this play—Therese and Laurent—are written to be knowing architects in their own downfall. This leads to a very deliberate style of characterisation which, like a compass, must always point due north, to the outcome of the play. The irony being, that this makes the characters feel unnatural. Being that this is an adaptation of a longer novel to a play, it is possible that the truncation diminished the characters. But this doesn’t diminish its accuracy as a criticism to this rendition. And despite the fact that the plot of the play is more lurid than most bourgeoisie tragedy, it can do little to vehicle such flat characters. In terms of themes and symbolism, there is nothing worth commenting on.
Is the play worth reading? In my opinion, it falls into that category of literature which is more interesting in theory than in practice; the question it raises is more interesting than the answer it gives. But that question illuminates a contention which plays across so much of the modern stage. If you look closely, you can see different forces play this role of fate—the psychological, the sociological, the economic, the playwright, or the absence of fate at all. Therese Raquin is a notable step in this journey, and in that sense, it has value. But if you want an effective modern tragedy, your time would be better spent on other plays.
Put less obtusely, can tragedy exist without the concept of providence? This may seem a strange way of opening a review of a play, but when it comes to appreciating much of 19th century theatre it is a useful guiding question. Since its conception in Athens, western tragedy has dealt with the inevitable fall of the noble to some kind of fated course. The Moirae draw out man’s life in red string, which has its set beginning and end, men are but playthings in the hands of capricious Gods. Oedipus and his prophetic fate; Orestes and his struggle with the furies; Pentheus against Dionysus; Prometheus bound. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that Harmartia—the axial machine of tragedy—is the word used both for a tragic fall and for Sin. As Sophocles said of tragedy: “In a tragedy, nothing is in doubt and everyone's destiny is known. […] he who kills is as innocent as he who gets killed: it's all a matter of what part you are playing. Tragedy is restful; and the reason is that hope, that foul deceitful thing, has no part in it.”
Fate and the stage share a strange relation, with the playwright themselves playing the part of a kind of God, who provides a providence to his or her characters through a scripted path, each arriving at an inevitable conclusion. So much of the pathos of theatre too is founded on this strange relation between character and author/audience—dramatic irony can only function when there is a gap between the knowledge of the audience and that of the character. And through that gap, humour, dread, sympathy, apathy, can be created. In fact, you could say that expectation is at the core of all theatre—looking at Aristotle’s devices, both reversal (Peripeteia) and revelation (Anagnorisis) rely on it. And one of the core forces of expectation, is fate.
This was perhaps a roundabout way to contextulise the initial question, which I hope now is more pointed: Without the conception of divinely ordained plan, can tragedy—the inevitable fall of a noble character in the face of fate—exist? In many ways, so much of realist theatre branches from this question, and consequentially the post-modern and absurd. It isn’t surprising that realism in the theatre arrived at particular foment of European intellectual history. The 19th century was the century of Darwin, of Freud, of Nietzsche, of Marx. It was a century born into a new world of economy and sociology, the century of the ‘new sciences’ and natural laws. Each sought to uncover the forces which guide the world, which define and confine human action. Each, you could say, were providing new forces to replace the divine hand of God. By the middle of the 19th century, God is dead, but plenty of new idols were raised in its place. And if there were new idols, then there were new ways to imagine human tragedy.
Though hardly a canonical text in world theatre, Emile Zola and his theatrical rendition of Therese Raquin articulates this transformational moment. You could say in relation to realist theatre ‘Zola is God, and Ibsen is his Prophet’. While Ibsen cemented Realism as the fiat accompi of the modern stage, it is Zola, and his clear vision of naturalist theatre, that defined the terms. Writing in a post-Darwinian world, Zola sought to square the circle of tragic fate in biological terms. People have set personalities and drives, genetically ordained; put in the right situation, these personalities will exist or clash mechanically, driving towards an inevitable outcome. Or, you could say, Fate. The tragedy of Therese Raquin is Zola’s exemplar of this naturalistic tragedy.
The Tragedy of Therese Raquin is one of naturalistic ‘necessity’. What happens when a bored, resentful housewife meets a philandering deadbeat don juan? What happens when the sickly husband stands in the way of the vital adulterer? What happens to a marriage cemented by the guilt of murder? Zola relies on the idea of inevitability of character to draw the audience into this tragedy of adultery, murder, guilt, and suicide—the table has been set, the billiard balls in place, the cue strikes the white ball, which ricochets into another, sinking it. It all unfolds mechanically.
In any work of this kind, dramaturgy is only half the question. The other half is whether the play is effective. Glibly, you could say that the characters in the play feel mechanical. But at the same time, it is a fairly penetrating criticism, as it points to an endemic flaw to Zola’s dramaturgy. In classical tragedies, our sympathy of the tragic hero is precisely in their struggle against fate, the distance between intention and destination. This is what invokes pity in the viewer. The Naturalistic approach instead makes this very internal intention ‘fate’, that intention is destination. The two leads in this play—Therese and Laurent—are written to be knowing architects in their own downfall. This leads to a very deliberate style of characterisation which, like a compass, must always point due north, to the outcome of the play. The irony being, that this makes the characters feel unnatural. Being that this is an adaptation of a longer novel to a play, it is possible that the truncation diminished the characters. But this doesn’t diminish its accuracy as a criticism to this rendition. And despite the fact that the plot of the play is more lurid than most bourgeoisie tragedy, it can do little to vehicle such flat characters. In terms of themes and symbolism, there is nothing worth commenting on.
Is the play worth reading? In my opinion, it falls into that category of literature which is more interesting in theory than in practice; the question it raises is more interesting than the answer it gives. But that question illuminates a contention which plays across so much of the modern stage. If you look closely, you can see different forces play this role of fate—the psychological, the sociological, the economic, the playwright, or the absence of fate at all. Therese Raquin is a notable step in this journey, and in that sense, it has value. But if you want an effective modern tragedy, your time would be better spent on other plays.
October 20, 2023
J'ai enfin fini ce maudit roman, et c'était deux mois d'une vraie torture, crois-mois. Difficile à y croire, mais pire que Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
The murder is the central action, with most of the book dredging through the interior emotion and heart-wrenching agony of the perpetrators. Zola was a master at pulling readers into his characters' inner lives--Thérèse and Laurent's anguish, passion, terror and rage. That said, the ending was predictable, but achingly sad.
Note: I read this in French, always a richer experience. I love passé simple.
The murder is the central action, with most of the book dredging through the interior emotion and heart-wrenching agony of the perpetrators. Zola was a master at pulling readers into his characters' inner lives--Thérèse and Laurent's anguish, passion, terror and rage. That said, the ending was predictable, but achingly sad.
Note: I read this in French, always a richer experience. I love passé simple.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 27, 2023
A fantastic opportunity
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews