LONDON - The early autumn sensation in London’s theater is a stage version of Dostoyevsky’s
“Crime and Punishment.” Dramatizations of this novel are nor uncommon, but this one
comes to us with special authority. It is staged and adapted by one of Russia’s leading
directors, Yuri Lyubimov; it is, in fact, a re-creation, with an English cast, of
a production that for five years has been in the repertory of his celebrated Moscow
theater, the avant-garden Taganka.
My Lyubimov is 65 but he still comes to London with the reputation of an enfant terrible.
He uses experimental techniques and he has attempted work that has satirized Soviet
society. The Taganka has had constant problems with Moscow’s censorship. After 20
years of struggle, frustration recently led Mr Lyubimov to offer his resignation
as head of the theater,an offer that was not accepted. He has an international reputation,
but when he has been invited to work abroad - either as a guest director or with
his own company - the Russian authorities have often refused him permission.
In a recent interview with The Times of London he said, “Every time I go abroad it
is a complex, tense and humiliating situation.” He told me that this year he had
been informed, “Yes, you may go on tour for the Taganka’s 20th anniversary; you may
go to Omsk.” It took five years to set up the London production of “Crime and Punishment,”
he said.
After the first night, a Soviet Embassy official in London said to Mr Lyubimov, “Well,
we’ve had the crime, the punishment will come when you get back to Moscow.” “At that
point,” said Mr Lyubimov “I stopped our conversation because he had insulted me
in the presence of a large number of witnesses - not just me but the prestige of
my country. I don’t think he spoke with high-level authority; he was not a diplomat,
just an irresponsible, badly-bred, local official.” The public controversy led to
speculation about whether Mr Lyubimov would defect, but the director subsequently
denied any such intention.
“Crime and Punishment” has not been, in Russia, one of Mr Lyubimov’s most controversial
productions; at least not compared with his last three projects, which were all banned
by the authorities before they even opened. But to Soviet opinion it has been disturbing
enough. Mr Lyubimov’s interpretation of the book runs counter to Soviet orthodoxy,
which sees the central Rasholnikov - the student who batters to death an old pawnbroker
and her sister - as a revolutionary before his time; a distorted idealist, perhaps,
but essentially the victim of Czarist oppression. At the end of the London production,
however, the actor playing Raskolnikov steps out of character and reads a blood-curdling
line from an essay on the novel actually written by a Moscow schoolchild. It says,
“Raskolnikov was right to kill the old woman; pity he got caught.” The Moscow production
went further, and confronted the audience with a display of real schoolbooks filled
with student essays, all regurgitating the official line. Mr Lyubimov says in the
audience feel “very uncomfortable.”
For him the book is “a cry of the soul against murder”, a Christian cry. “You can’t
consider yourself a higher judge of people; that’s for God,” he says. This is not
an interpretation likely to arouse much opposition in the /west. What has stopped
London audiences in their tracks is the immense theatricality of the concept and
the execution. This “Crime and Punishment” is one of the most sustained nightmares
ever put upon a stage, and yet is completely free from sensationalism.
The production is dominated by a door: a bloodstained door that dances about the
stage, moving from the vertical to the diagonal to the horizontal, and with a cruel
habit of revealing characters who would far rather stay hidden. It seems to be the
door of Raskolnikov’s own room, where he crouches after the murder, but it also suggests
that door that he insanely left open while committing his otherwise perfect crime.
The play begins after the murder, but it does a certain amount of cutting-back to
things that precede it in the novel. For the most part, though, the play moves quickly
and chronologically through the events that end with Raskolnikov's surrender and
imprisonment. Its cross-cutting techniques may suggest collage, but it is actually
pretty faithful to the original narrative.
Atmosphere is created by harsh stabs of music and lighting; the characters are liable
to pick up the stage lights and shine them on each other or the audience. The imagery
is half that of the confessional, half inquisition, and it creates a peculiar frenzied
climate for the actors. Most critics have commented that the cast reaches emotional
peaks generally considered inaccessible to British players. But amid terrifying trappings
- and Mr Lyubimov insisted on the actual music and the actual props from the beginning
of rehearsals - they would have to. There is no calculation about it.
Mr Lyubimov - a jovially sardonic visionary - cast the play on a brief preliminary
visit to London four months ago. He secured an extraordinary company of 20, comprising
some of the busiest actors in London. (And not working for West End salaries: “Crime
and Punishment” is at the Lyric Theater in outlying Hammersmith.)
Raskolnikov is played by Michael Pennington, who two years ago was Hamlet for the
Royal Shakespeare Company. That was a notably benign performance; this one is ruthlessly
uncompassionate, almost to excess. The harshness, he says, was the director’s choice
(“the most unsentimental director imaginable”) Mr Lyubimov is also very much an actor’s
director. Until 20 years ago he was a performer himself, and a very successful one.
He directs, unfashionably, by demonstration. Mr Pennington describes his “sketching
something in the air, like a Hirschfeld drawing,” for the actor to flesh out. Mr
Lyubimov speaks no English, but his Russian is torrential. With two interpreters
straining to keep up with him, rehearsals were, in Mr Pennington’s words, “pretty
noisy.”
The “exciting whiff in the nostril” that Mr Pennington says he scented when he auditioned,
inspired him to travel at his own expense to see the Moscow production and to starve
himself to fit his own picture of the penniless student Raskolnikov. His face is
now skull-like, awesome on stage and terrifying off it. The same fierceness infects
the other performances. This must be the only adaptation to make a strong un-mawkish
character of Sonya (played by Veronica Roberts), the pious prostitute who persuades
Raskolnikov to give himself up.
There are weaknesses. Some characters make little impression or are even confusing;
the constant intensity risks monotony, and though the techniques are startling they
are not new. This is what one expects a Slavonic avant-garde play to look and sound
like. But this production takes the Dostoyevskyan atmosphere and makes a theatrical
fact. It shows us the crowded streets and fetid rooms of St Petersburg, and gives
their inhabitants the dimensions of King Lear on his heath.
