A groundbreaking proponent of naturalism, Emile Zola approached his characters with a self-professed scientific detachment. But this production of his dramatisation of his 1867 novel, in a new translation by Pauline McLynn, squashes the life out of them before smearing them on to the microscope slide.

Stiffly directed with an excruciating absence of pace or dynamism by Elizabeth Bowe, Zola’s tale of animal passions, guilt and despair is rendered at best dull and at worst faintly ridiculous. A cast of international actors, whose various accents lend some curious and distorting intonations to the text, deliver performances that begin as shallow and mannered and end up, nearly three painful hours later, self-indulgently melodramatic.

Thérèse is unhappily married to her sickly cousin, Camille, and inhabits a claustrophobic and sterile ménage à trois with her husband and his doting mother above their haberdashery in Paris. Her affair with Camille’s artist friend Laurent – the development of which Zola’s play never permits us to see – prompts the lovers to murder Camille by drowning him in the Seine. But the conspirators are haunted by the horror of their crime, and by an uncanny sense of Camille’s ghostly presence observing them – not least from the portrait of him by Laurent that hangs, glaring down in judgment, over the fireplace.

Bowe suggests the stifling atmosphere of bourgeois respectability, but not the sinister power of bestial appetite’s capacity to provoke bloody acts of destruction. Scenes of the Raquins’ domesticity are certainly tedious, stuffed with endless aching pauses, but they never seethe with repressed desire.

As the plot becomes more torrid, the staging grows sillier. When Mme Raquin discovers the truth about her son’s death she is stricken by a sudden paralysis conveyed here with cartoonish head-clutching and eye-rolling. The descent into farce continues as the tormented Thérèse and Laurent plot each other’s demise under the googly, malevolent gaze of the now mute and motionless Mme Raquin, until finally they swig poison, convulse ludicrously and, at long, long last, die.

Zola’s writing, with its overcooked plot and preoccupation with defining characteristics rather than complete complex characters, must bear responsibility for some of the play’s dramatic pitfalls; but Bowe clumsily stumbles into every one of them. Deadly.

Box office: 020-8237 1111 (to Sept 7)

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