Therese
by ÉMile Zola, Thomas Job

A really first class murder story.

The play tells of Therese Raquin, her husband Camille, her mother-in-law and her artist lover.

It is set in the Paris of 1875.

Camille, the husband, is a milliner, a prig and a complainer, and not nearly as interesting as the family border, the artist.

So Therese and the artist fake an accident on a Sunday outing in a canoe and come back home and tell the old lady her son is gone.

She accepts the story and is pleased, when, after a year, Therese and the artist marry.

But the wedding makes no honeymoon for the the guilty lovers - for the dead Camille is forever between them.

Everything - every turn of conversation - leads to Camille, and with shortened tempers they begin mutual recriminations.

The old lady overhears - and the shock of realizing that her son was murdered makes her a paralytic, unable to talk, able to move only her eyes.

But she finally communicates the story to the Inspector of Police through the medium of some dominoes.