Emile Zola’s 19th century shocker drew a predictable response from an offended bourgeois readership when it first appeared on the Paris bookstalls.

Like his contemporary Gustave Flaubert, Zola saw his characters and their desperate lives as a “tranche de vie” - a slice of real life. Flaubert did it with his novel Madame Bovary, where morality flies out of the window when frustration comes in. The French public thought the world of moral behaviour had crumbled overnight!

Both Zola, Flaubert and their contemporary Charles Baudelaire underwent public condemnation – Baudelaire ending up in prison on an obscenity charge ,for his great poem cycle Les Fleurs du Mal, now hailed as a masterpiece.

As this stunning production unfolds, you begin to see why the 19th century took the stance it did. Zola said his mission was to “see everything, know everything, say everything” and he had no intention of stopping at the bedroom door !

When the reviews came out, Therese Raquin was described as “ a pool of mud and blood, representing the filth that is modern literature”.

Clearly this makes for marvellous theatre in a clever production by Jonathan Munby with a script by Helen Edmundson that brings you to the edge of your seat and holds you there.

Briefly, Therese Raquin, (Pippa Nixon) a moody but physically attractive young woman is married to her cousin Camille, a sickly mother’s boy( Hugh Skinner) . It is a loveless marriage with an ingrowing sterility reflected in Camille’s “don’t touch me” attitude. in the bedroom..Therese slowly retreats into silence.

The highlight of the week in this dreary household set above a French provincial draper’s shop, is a game of dominoes, presided over by the young man’s mother, Madame Raquin (Alison Steadman). The widow Raquin and the married couple move to Paris, in comes Camille’s good-looking friend Laurent (Kieran Bew) and the furtive illicit affair begins, with Therese and Laurent moving slowly into a landscape of death and cruelty that is as disturbing as anything I have seen at the RSC in Stratford.

But Mr Munby adds brilliant detail. At times it is seen in a hand indolenty holding a cigarette, or Mme Raquin’s indulgent laugh, and always present is a quartet of actors who glide on and off like lithe dancers moving the set around, dressing the characters, or standing like a Greek chorus observing the passage of events as the final tragedy unfolds. First class performances all round make for a glorious evening’s theatre with solid gold cameos from Desmond Barritt as a retired police inspector,and Michael Mears as the aggravatingly unctuous Grivet, a railway clerk.