Thérèse (Keira Knightley) dreams of something more while her doltish cousin, Camille (Gabriel Ebert), sits with her by the river (photo by Joan Marcus)

Studio 54
254 West 54th St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 3, $47-$137
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

There’s fire and ice in Helen Edmundson’s new adaptation of Émile Zola’s 1867 serial novel and 1873 play, Thérèse Raquin, which opened last night at Studio 54. On the edge between gothic melodrama and nineteenth-century realism, Zola tells a familiar story, evoking Poe, Dostoevsky, Dreiser, Shakespeare, and Balzac as well as such films as Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water, René Clément’s Purple Noon, and Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity. (Zola’s novel has also been turned into numerous films, miniseries, musicals, an opera, and other stage productions, in various languages.) In 1868 France, poor orphan Thérèse Raquin (Keira Knightley) has spent years like Cinderella, taken in by her aunt, Madame Raquin (Judith Light), and her cousin, Camille (Gabriel Ebert), after her North African mother died and her French sailor father disappeared at sea. More a maid than a member of the family, Thérèse aches for something more. She sits by the river, watching the water flow and the swans fly by, but where she sees freedom, Camille, a pathetically weak and spoiled momma’s boy, sees nothing but “the same water as yesterday.” Madame Raquin and Camille don’t even allow Thérèse to open the windows, whether in their small village or after they move to Paris, where Camille seeks success in the modern city, away from the ancestral countryside. Thérèse lives a trapped life wherever they are, especially after she is forced to marry the sniggering Camille, but from the moment she meets the virile, handsome, artistic Laurent (Matt Ryan), she sees a way out. In fact, when he first enters the Raquin home, she is staring out the window; it is as if he has entered straight out of her daydreams. Thérèse and Laurent soon begin a passionate sexual affair. “My God. You were born for this,” Laurent proclaims with wonder during their initial tryst. “We will live between these sheets, within this room, behind this door,” Thérèse declares. “We will live.” But Camille stands in their way, and they are soon planning the perfect murder.

Matt Ryan, Judith Light, Keira Knightley, and Gabriel Ebert star in Roundabout adaptation of Émile Zola novel (photo by Joan Marcus)

Commissioned for Roundabout’s fiftieth anniversary season, Thérèse Raquin is a bleak but compelling melodrama. Beowulf Boritt’s sets, which include a side-by-side dining room/bedroom, a riverfront with real water, a small artist’s garret that dangles from above, and an abstract painted backdrop, are as dark and dank as Jane Greenwood’s period costumes, which favor black, brown, and gray. Royal Shakespeare Company veteran Ryan (Constantine, Small Change) and two-time Oscar nominee Knightley (Pride and Prejudice, The Imitation Game) have electric chemistry; in her Broadway debut, Knightley transforms from a mousy, silent wallflower into a libidinous woman who is almost afraid of her sudden, deep desires, often acting primarily with her mesmerizing eyes. Tony winner Ebert (Matilda the Musical, 4,000 Miles) has fun playing the fanciful dullard Camille, while two-time Tony winner Light (Other Desert Cities, The Assembled Parties) shows once more that she is one of Broadway’s most dependable actors as the somewhat clueless mother who elegantly devolves throughout the play. Rounding out the cast is Jeff Still as Monsieur Grivet, an efficiency expert who makes sure the dinner table is always in its exact proper place, David Patrick Kelly as retired superintendent Michaud, who can still sniff out trouble, and Mary Wiseman as Suzanne, Michaud’s buxom niece, who is as flighty as Thérèse is at first gloomy. Edmundson’s (The Heresy of Love, The Clearing) script jumps around too much and doesn’t fully explore the various subplots and minor characters, especially regarding a brutal local murder, and Evan Cabnet’s (A Kid Like Jake, The Performers) direction is, like Monsieur Grivet, efficient, if not inspiring. But Ryan and Knightley make quite the ravenous couple, sending the audience through a roller coaster of emotions as they seek true happiness — or at least sexual fulfillment — at any tawdry cost. “In Thérèse Raquin my aim has been to study temperaments and not characters,” Zola wrote in the preface to the second edition of his novel. “That is the whole point of the book. I have chosen people completely dominated by their nerves and blood, without free will, drawn into each action of their lives by the inexorable laws of their physical nature. Thérèse and Laurent are human animals, nothing more.” Knightley and Ryan embody that human-animal nature with fervor to spare in this gripping production.