Thérèse Raquin
Opening Night: October 29, 2015
Closing: January 3, 2016
Theater: Studio 54
In this tale of love, lust, betrayal, and guilt, Thérèse has made peace with her loveless marriage to a weak man when her world is turned upside down by Laurent walking through the door. Unable to ignore their passion, the pair sets off on a violent path that may have far worse consequences for the perpetrators than for the victims.
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October 29, 2015
From the moment we first set eyes on the title character of “Thérèse Raquin,” the bleak literary melodrama that opened on Thursday night at Studio 54, we know without a doubt that she is doomed, doomed, doomed. Portrayed with a dedicated and joyless intensity by the film star Keira Knightley in her Broadway debut, she makes her entrance in the play’s opening seconds in stern, silhouetted profile, carrying a bowl of water and a heap of bad karma. Her gait is laboriously slow and measured, as if she were leading a funeral procession for all her hopes and dreams. And though you may assume, dear innocent theatergoer, that things can only lighten up for this poor blighted creature, she will continue to march in lock step with an unforgiving destiny for the succeeding two and a half hours. Happiness is never in the cards in this tale of murder and adultery. And that’s as true for audiences at this Roundabout Theater Company production, directed by Evan Cabnet, as it is for our gal Thérèse.
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October 29, 2015
About a quarter through the new and uneven Broadway revival of “Therese Raquin,” you begin to wonder why Keira Knightley has put herself through this. Her Broadway debut seems to be about playing a lonely, detached and diffident girl in a slow-moving parlor play. She looks wan. She gazes through windows. She generally moons about. Then, the heat gets turned up. To be more specific, her husband’s hunky friend Laurent — Matt Ryan, channeling Colin Farrell — arrives. Knightley’s Therese can’t resist this sexy, can’t-be-tamed, artistic type, despite her wedding ring. He can’t help himself either. Soon, Therese and Laurent are on fire, kissing passionately, ripping off their clothes and radiating spasms of love. On the menu now is adultery but also murder, violence and misery. Now you know why Knightley is here.
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October 29, 2015
Keira Knightley says she has been approached at least three times to play Thérèse Raquin in one or another adaptation of the 1867 Zola novel. She finally succumbed when offered Helen Edmundson’s version, figuring there must be a reason everyone imagined her in the role of an orphan turned adulteress turned accomplice to murder. That reason is evident in the Roundabout production that opened tonight at Studio 54, in which Knightley, well known from films including “Bend It Like Beckham” and “Pirates of the Caribbean,” makes a stark and somewhat counterintuitive Broadway debut. She is compelling and articulate, especially when silent, and brings to the morose tale the banked-fire quality that seems to illuminate such material from within. Which is a good thing, since it isn’t much illuminated from without. That’s no one’s fault, really, unless it’s Zola’s; he saw himself as a kind of literary chemist, mixing personality types like reagents and letting them do what they will. We know what type Thérèse is from the second she appears, before the house lights are even fully down: She’s the type who is permanently on edge, looking for a way to escape a life of crushing unhappiness. The orphan ward of her aunt, Madame Raquin, she has been raised in the shadow of that foolish and imperious lady’s son, Camille, a spoiled hypochondriac she is forced to wed as soon as she turns 21. This mating of first cousins is not, naturally, a passionate one: “Now that we are married,” the infantile Camille sniggers as they get into bed together for the first time, “I could see your breasts if I wanted to.” He never does.
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October 29, 2015
Keira Knightley (“The Imitation Game,” the upcoming “The Emperor’s Children”) is making her Broadway debut in “Thérèse Raquin,” and not since Donna Reed donned spectacles and pulled her hair back in a tight bun as a spinster librarian in “It’s A Wonderful Life” has so much effort gone into draining all the sex from a sexy star. It worked: Helen Edmundson’s new adaptation of the 1867 Émile Zola novel (and, six years later, play) of illicit passion and its consequences is DOA, victim of its own literal dark-mindedness. Most of the elements of film noir are here in spades: Thérèse is betrothed and then married to her vain, sickly cousin Camille (Gabriel Ebert, a Tony winner for Matilda), egged along by his doting mother (Emmy and Tony winner Judith Light, of Other Desert Cities and Transparent). When Camille invites new friend Laurent (Royal Shakespeare Company member Matt Ryan) home, sparks fly a la The Postman Always Rings Twice or Body Heat. Their molten affair prompts Camille’s murder, which according to the rules of 19th century melodrama, must lead to the end of, first, sex and then life itself. No fun!
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October 29, 2015
As the title character in “Thérèse Raquin,” Keira Knightley has little to say in the play’s first half hour. Married to her peevish cousin, Camille (Gabriel Ebert)—a sickly giraffe of a man with a doting, controlling mother (Judith Light)—Thérèse is consigned to the margins of a dull 19th-century French country life. But at the end of each scene, Keith Parham’s lighting catches her alone, in the stage equivalent of a close-up, and we see her seethe. She’s a loaded gun, and when Camille moves the family to Paris, she goes off in ruthless lust with a sexy rake, Laurent (Matt Ryan). “Thank God there is still some blood in my veins,” she tells him. “I thought they had bled me dry.”
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