NEW PLAY PREMIERE – 12 MARCH 2025 🎭🔥

A bold reimagining of Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, this adaptation by Onur Yuce explores race, migration, and power in a society where human worth is measured by whiteness and class. Combining intense storytelling with the raw rhythms of Africa, it transforms murder from an act of passion into a sacrificial ritual woven into the mechanisms of power.

Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin has always been a novel of passion and crime. However, beneath its naturalist framework lies a deeper question: What is the true value of a human life? This adaptation does not merely depict two lovers being consumed by a spiral of guilt; it also interrogates the ruthless hierarchies of race, migration, and belonging. Thérèse is not just a woman under oppression—she is racialized, marginalized, and trapped in a society where human worth is measured by whiteness and class. Her desires are considered dangerous not only because they lead to a crime but because they threaten the perceived purity of the world she has been forcibly placed into. In a system that sanctifies conformity, Thérèse’s condemnation is inevitable—not because of fate, but because she has always been the one society deems expendable.

This staging revives the rhythms and textures of Africa, the land of Thérèse’s mother, the erased lineage that French societal expectations sought to obliterate. The blood, intensity, and violence of the story are tied to a much deeper and more primal truth: we live in a world that is increasingly transforming into a society ready to kill, where violence is becoming more normalized and ritualized. In this play, murder is not merely an act of passion; it is a sacrificial ritual, a transaction woven into the mechanisms of power. The rhythms of Africa do not merely create an atmosphere; they resonate as a history that refuses to be silenced, a defiance against erasure, like the heartbeat of ancestors still pulsing beneath the surface.

At the heart of this vision stands Molek, the god of blood and sacrifice—a being that reflects society’s cold, calculated justice. Madame Raquin is not merely seeking revenge; she becomes an instrument of a system that demands atonement through destruction. This adaptation moves Thérèse Raquin beyond psychological realism, transforming it into a myth of power, exile, and the destructive nature of civilization. It constructs a world where whiteness grants innocence, crime is inherited, and violence is not an exception but the very foundation of order. As the characters become stained with their own blood, the play poses a haunting question:

At what point did we all become killers, merely waiting for the right moment?

Antalya State Theatre

Translated-adapted and scored by Onur Yuce

Directed by Murat Cidamli