Crime and Punishment review – gripping portrait of Dostoevsky’s murderous antihero
Laurie Sansom’s bold decision to stage the literary classic with a cast of three pays off in parts thanks to compelling performances and an atmosphere of shadowy dread
You might say it were a bold move to stage Dostoevsky’s landmark novel with a cast of three. That is not only because Northern Broadsides does not usually stage small-scale adaptations: this studio tour is a first. More to the point, it is that a 750-page literary classic hardly suggests such economy of means.
You could make the case, however, that Laurie Sansom’s reworking should have been bolder still. How might it have been if the director had gone the whole hog and slimmed it down to a single actor?
Counterintuitive or not, the best sequences in this production are when Connor Curren is alone on stage as Raskolnikov, the troubling antihero who commits a double murder for no better reason than a thought experiment. Whether showing sociopathic indifference or fevered regret, Curren is compelling when he gets the chance to let us into his thinking. Haunted and dishevelled, he is a delusional philosopher, driven by extremes of poverty to turn abstract thought into brutal action. Dostoevsky’s innovation was to show the crime from the criminal’s perspective and Sansom’s adaptation is most gripping when it does the same.
Too often the other scenes, in which Curren spars with Trudy Akobeng and Niall Costigan, both playing multiple parts, seem comparatively small and sketchy. The tension dissipates in lightly drawn exchanges between Raskolnikov and those who drift in and out of his life, rarely lingering long enough to establish a story of their own. They are more than projections of his troubled mind, but less than fully fledged characters. And they cannot match the chill horror of a solitary assassin counting the 730 steps to his kill.
Although dramatically uneven, the approach is theatrically resourceful. The actors play a central part in Chris Davey’s dynamic lighting, repositioning angle-poise lamps to create the mood of an interrogation room or grabbing handheld flashlights for scenes of shadowy introspection.
Meanwhile, a steep beam through a skylight on Rose Revitt’s set casts an icy chill over Raskolnikov’s bedsit where cardboard models of St Petersburg tenements light up floor by floor. As Philip Pinsky’s soundtrack goes from pretty keyboard melodies to unsettling rumbles, it builds an atmosphere of expressionist dread.