Although it now comes across more like nightmarishly symbolist melodrama than naturalism, Emile Zola's depressive horror novel of 1867 - which he himself adapted as a hugely influential stage play in 1873 - still delivers a nasty charge in Nicholas Wright's new adaptation. It also provides one of the darkest, most astringent costume dramas I've seen at the Gate in some time.
It's the claustrophobic tale of a petit-petit-bourgeois family who eke out their existence in two rooms over a shop. The limp Camille is pampered by his mother and is nastily spiteful to his adopted sister, Therese, whom he has quasi-incestuously married. However, an old family friend, the painter Laurent, returns and embarks on a furtive, intense affair with Therese, their carnal passions culminating in a boating "accident", which leads to the murder of Camille.
Laurent eventually takes the place of Camille in the oppressive family routines, becoming a replacement son for Madame Racquin and finally, according to plan, a husband to Therese. But Therese's passion has curdled into revulsion, and we are left to watch the downward spiral into terror and madness as the pair become trapped in the perversely exquisite success of their perfect crime.
It is a queasy depiction of the fickleness of lust, with Phelim Drew's Laurent full of broody, lecherous hypocrisy. But Donna Dent, as Therese, is the complex, unpredictable hub of the piece: all stymied emotion, absences and distracted utterances, except for the nervily affecting love scenes and the howling rage of the final scene.
Some groaning explicatory passages aside, the script is an excellent vehicle of purely psychological violence - and nowhere more so when the old bird, Madame Racquin, watches the young couple tear each other apart in the agony of having killed for love.
Michael Caven's direction is clear and functional throughout. In a sense, he has to work across the grain of the Gate actors who work the familiar stage like pros and on occasion threaten to veer into chocolate-box territory - as in the jolly japes of Barry McGovern and Des Cave as the two older, foolish clerks. But Zola's mortuary humour rarely allows you such easy comforts.
• Until March 17. Box office: 00 353 1 874 4045.
