IN HIS preface to his notorious 1868 novel Thérèse Raquin, Emile Zola compares his function as author to that of “an analyst . . . a surgeon in an operating theatre”. The writer, whose ground-breaking naturalism scandalised contemporary critics, unflinch- ingly lays bare the base human impulses that lead a predatory man and a repressed married woman to commit first adultery and then murder.
In The Bodies, Peter Flannery’s first full-length theatre work for 17 years, Zola’s book becomes a rollicking melo- drama, sauced with salty humour and lashings of explicit sex. Flannery transports the action from Paris to Newcastle, with Camille, Thérèse’s husband, meeting his untimely end in the Tyne.
This doesn’t entirely work; the characters’ names are still incongruously Gallic, as is their habit of popping out for a bottle of champagne or cognac on a whim. But the dialogue is tough and anachronistically modern, delivered, in Maggie Norris’s production, with a brutal, almost vicious, urgency.
As the sickly Camille, Craig Conway makes his first entrance crawling, Gollum-like, down a steep wooden ramp. It’s an arresting image — an eerie foreshadowing of the way his ghost will later slither out of his watery grave to haunt his widow. And there are many such striking moments: Jill Halfpenny (formerly of EastEnders and a stellar Strictly Come Dancing competitor) is excellent as Thérèse, buried alive in her stifling marital home and wild with unleashed desire in the arms of her lover, Ben Porter’s wolfish, faintly Estuary-accented Laurent (pictured with Halfpenny).
The action is persistently undercut with humour. “Laurent, I’m so glad you came!” cries Camille, bursting in on his wife and best friend with an unmistakably phallic, foaming bottle of bubbly in his hand, heedless of their post- coital panting.
Advertisement
Characters also speak conspiratorially to the audience. “Are her breasts big enough?” Laurent asks us, regarding Thérèse with lip-licking anticipation. But the shift to tragedy is awkward, and the overwrought scenes in which the murderous couple find their carnality supplanted by gnawing guilt seem to drag after the production’s earlier frenetic intensity.
Yet the play does probe the anatomy of animal lust, un- softened by any genuine emotional connection. We see it in the snarling sexual and material greed of Porter’s Laurent, in Halfpenny’s trapped, febrile Thérèse, and even in Conway’s Camille, exacting his husband’s dues from a wife he barely knows.
Grimly relevant to our sex-obsessed world, The Bodies peels back the skin of passion — and it’s not a pretty sight.