Review: Therese Raquin - at the Festival Theatre, Malvern, from Monday, August 18 to Saturday, August 23, 2014.

HOLD on to your belts and braces! This racy yet dark tale of debauchery and destruction is likely to have the Aunt Myrtles of Malvern reaching for the smelling salts.

Mind you, there was one nearby elderly gentleman who narrowly avoided missing a particularly eye-popping erotic scene...

Just moments before he had been nodding off but shrugged aside his slumbers in time to catch a wonderfully executed - almost ballet-esque - choreographed performance of simulated sex on and around a four-poster bed!

It was far from offensive or gratuitous, and just how anyone could have contemplated closing their eyes at any stage is a mystery as this was top quality nail-biting theatre throughout.

Helen Edmundson, together with director Jonathan Munby, has successfully produced a fascinatingly dramatic adaptation of Emile Zola’s novel of 1867 in which the couplings end up cursed.

The lust is heavily ladled out as we switch from sleepy rural backwater to the backstreets of Paris where a chance meeting leads to passions tumultuously unleashed, and eventually murder followed by retribution.

Pippa Nixon is as perfect as possible as Therese, the repressed young woman who must be married off - at the insistence of the aunt who adopted her, to her fragile and sickly son Camille, who is Therese’s cousin. But during a regular cards evening with their small circle of friends, hosted by Madam Raquin, she first meets and falls for Camille’s work colleague, the lusty Laurent, and they then head along the route to ultimate destruction.

Quite a transformation from a church mouse.

This gathering of friends and Laurent’s gate-crashing is the important fulcrum of the play where Desmond Barrit’s imposing Superintendent Michaud and Michael Mears’ simpering Grivet provide excellent support as well as some light relief in the gathering darkness.

Alison Steadman shines, as expected, as the aunt who noisily fusses around family and friends – a performance in keeping with her well remembered and respected Mrs Bennet in television’s Pride and Prejudice. Captivating still at a stroke in silence, or rather after a stroke caused by the shock of learning the truth.

Also impressive are Hugh Skinner and Kieran Bew, who play the two men in the lives of the leading ladies – the hypochondriac and sometimes childish son Camille and ill-fated lover Laurent.

The set design, although quite minimalist, worked extremely well with finely timed and choreographic changes, while the haunting scenes, as madness consumed the errant couple, were splendidly chilling.

It’s a thoroughly compelling psychological thriller, excellently staged and acted, and highly recommended.