Flaubert massacred

Fay Weldon's ridiculous adaptation of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary serves as a warning for upstart writers who mess around with great novels while transferring them from page to stage.

To read Flaubert's great account of female desire and existential panic and then to expose yourself to Miss Weldon's Breakfast with Emma, as she subtitles her coarse, trivialising version, is like eating supper at McDonald's after a cordon bleu lunch.

And Polly Teale, normally a remarkable director when it comes to discovering theatrical images that convey unconscious states of mind, panders to Weldon's strenuously melodramatising tendencies.

Miss Weldon's adaptation centres upon a last breakfast during which Emma confesses her adulteries to her dull, doctor husband Charles.

In the original novel, of course, the cuckolded medical man never really learns of Emma's liaisons until after she is dead, but Miss Weldon's device allows for Adrian Schiller's woebegone doctor to succumb to self-pity.

The main idea, though, is to exchange Flaubert's chronological narrative for that exhausted cliché, the flashback. Jonathan Fensom's set, with just a breakfast table and enough doors for a Feydeau farce, becomes the scene of adulterous re-enactments.

Flaubert's meticulous evoking of period and place, of character, manners and overspending is discarded. And it is unclear whether Weldon's heroine finally poisons herself.

Emma, Charles and her lovers, Leon and Rodolphe, both played by the unsuitably mature Simon Thorp, are deprived of much of Flaubert's fresh, limpid dialogue and lumbered with Weldon's style of 1940s Gainsborough-Studios heavy-breathing passionspeak: "What we had was madness,"; "It's easy for me, I'm a man,"; "We have unfinished business, Emma."

Miss Teale's production matches Weldon's inanities with preposterous, cumbersome replays of Madame Bovary's erotic encounters. Sex is represented by rapid opening and closing of doors and much rolling and swooning about the stage. A night at the opera even leads to Emma and her lover singing along in karaoke style.

There is scant sign of the fabulous complexity of Flaubert's stricken Madame Bovary, desperate for escape from the constrictions of a loveless marriage and an empty life. As Emma, Amanda Drew acts direct to the audience. Her awful, artificial performance is permanently pitched over the top. She moans, quavers, quivers, lavishly throws herself around and clutches the furniture and fittings like a Victorian tragedy queen. Preposterous.

Madame Bovary - Breakfast With Emma