Marianne Elliott, the National's ascending directorial star, has cut a startling swathe through the murky, murderous world of Emile Zola's novel Thérèse Raquin.

Zola billed his psychologically motivated novel of 1867 as "the precise anatomy of a particular human illness". The "illness" he subjected to close naturalistic scrutiny was a murder committed by Laurent, Thérèse's married lover, and precipitated by their sexual passion. The object of their violent intentions is Thérèse's invalid husband, her cousin Camille.

If you merely read Nicholas Wright's adaptation of Zola's psychological thriller rather than experience it in Elliott's feverish, flamboyant staging, you could be forgiven for thinking Wright had achieved a realistic evocation of petit bourgeois life in Paris, the murder committed off-stage. Elliott's production, though, cuts free of realism's bonds and boldly conjures up a world of spectacular expressionism.

Designer Hildegard Bechtler conceives the vast grey-walled apartment, with one small window near the ceiling, as akin to a prison. Lighting designer Neil Austin swathes the place in spooky twilight and shadows. Actors are caught in frozen tableaux. The scene is a domestic summer evening, but instead it seems like four o'clock in a dark night of the soul.

Visitors for Thursday night dominoes, Mark Hadfield's obsessive-compulsive office worker Monsieur Grivet and Michael Culkin's retired police inspector, with niece in tow, excitedly bring news of the latest neighbourhood murder. Together with Patrick Kennedy's vacuously chattering Camille and Judy Parfitt, in dominating form as his egotistical and finally devastated mother, these actors send lovely shafts of realistic and satirical comedy into the gloomy air.

The secret, frustrated lovers, though, exist in their own stylised world. Charlotte Emerson's Thérèse, ironically dressed in white, adopts a stiff walk, sits bent forward as if troubled by severe indigestion. She and Ben Daniels's statuesque Laurent stand tense on either side of a door, advertising their alienation. Left alone, they fall groping, grasping and kissing while Thérèse spouts passionate Barbara-Cartlandese.

However, Emerson and Daniels, for all their writhings and verbal effusions, ultimately seem no more aroused or ardent than mismated pandas. After Camille's murder has been passed off as an accident, after the couple are married with Madame Raquin's blessing, Emerson turns frigid and guilty.

Elliott duly pulls out the stops. Madame Raquin's stroke, when eavesdropping on the guilty couple, comes as no coup de thé‚tre, and she is subsequently placed, in glaring speechlessness, away from our gaze. The torment of the now-incompatible, despairing lovers, suggested by a sound-score of heartbeats and Olly Fox's forceful music, takes on a final, melodramatic vehemence. Elliott brilliantly puts on a show. I doubt it's altogether right for Thérèse Raquin.

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