When it comes to exploring the forgotten slipstreams of pre-20th century European drama, the Arcola makes the National, which ought to venture in the same, unfamiliar terrain, seem by comparison a parochial paddler.
True to form, this east London theatre offers fresh, fascinating insight into the subjugation of 19th century young women at the hands of male sexuality and power. The Catholic religion exerts its traditional, repressive hold as well.
In a production lacking claustrophobic intensity, director Irina Brown puts false emphasis upon ethnic song and dance displays, as if to keep reminding us Janáček based his famous opera Jenufa on this play by Gabriela Preissova.
Yet in the Arcola's British premiere, 117 years after its Prague first performance, the appeal of Preissova's near-tragedy survives intact. Originally entitled Her Stepdaughter, Preissova shows how a bourgeois, mill-owning family in a narrow-minded Catholic community is caught in the toils of sexual betrayal, murder and forgiveness.
Timberlake Wertenbaker, introducing the text (Faber, £8.99), claims her adaptation of the original makes it very much a new piece. Her Jenufa does, though, closely follow the main lines of Janáček's opera. Unfortunately, Wertenbaker's version, far too prone to explanatory monologues, abounds with archaic, not very speakable Victorian diction and some discordant, modern language, too.
The plot shows how the subservience of Jodie McNee's poignant Jenufa to a drunken, young lover (Ben Mansfield's Steva), and to her smugly pious stepmother, Kostelnichka, proves disastrous. The scar, slashed upon Jenufa's face in an unconvincing display of jealous violence by Steva's sexually smitten stepbrother Latsa (Oscar Pearce), seals her fate.
For those unfamiliar with the opera, it would be unfair to give away details of a riveting account of how the unmarried Jenufa loses her two-day-old child, thanks to a 19th century reverence for respectability.
Paola Dionisotti's playing of the petit bourgeois, black-comedy figure of Kostelnichka as some martyred, grande dame of Greek tragedy proportions, distracts our attention away from where it should be - on Miss McNee's impressive, anguished Jenufa.
Until 17 November. Information: 020 7503 1646.
Jenufa
Arcola Theatre
Arcola Street, E8 2DJ
