November 2008

A taut new adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's classic tale of murder, guilt and redemption. "Crime and Punishment" is one of the most gripping and claustrophobic works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a writer with an uncanny ability to transcribe the mental contortions and shifting uncertainties of characters on the edge of madness. (He was himself an epileptic in a time when the condition was little understood, and a chronic gambler.)

Raskolnikov, a former student, murders an elderly woman money-lender and her half sister on the premise that certain people are born possessed of an intrinsic right that entitles them to commit all manner of crimes in the name of humanity. Having taken the steps from thought to deed, however, he finds himself unable to bear the horror of what he has done and embarks upon a difficult journey through denial, confession and, ultimately, redemption. A thoroughly transporting night of high drama and, quite simply, a rollicking good story. Crime & Punishment played at Barons Court Theatre, London - Nov 2008

Directed and Produced by Connie Stephens ... ... ... Adapted for the stage by Joanna O'Connor ... ... ... Stage Manager - Mark Magill

The Cast

Raskolnikov - James Kingdon ... Dounia/Sonia/Katerina Ivanovna/Alyona Ivanovna/Nastasya/ - Joanna O'Connor ... Razumikhin/Porfiry/Svidrigaïlov/Luzhin - Christopher Gutmann

Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky (1821 – 1881)

Dostoyevsky grew up in a middle-class family in Moscow. His father, a doctor, was a tyrant towards his family and his mother was a mild, religious woman who died before Dostoyevsky was sixteen. At his father's insistence, Dostoyevsky trained as an engineer in St. Petersburg. While the youth was at school, his father was murdered by his own serfs at the family's small country estate. Dostoyevsky rarely mentioned his father's murder, but Oedipal themes are recurrent in his work and Sigmund Freud suggested that the novelist's epilepsy was a manifestation of guilt over his repressed wish for his father's death.

Dostoyevsky graduated from engineering school but chose a literary career. His first published work, a translation of Balzac's novel Eugenie Grandet, appeared in a St. Petersburg journal in 1844. Two years later, he published his first novel, Bednye lyudi (1846;Poor Folk), a naturalistic tale with a clear social message as well as a subtle description of life's tragic aspects as manifested in everyday existence. The twenty-four-year-old author became an overnight celebrity when Vissarion Belinsky, the most influential critic of the day, praised Dostoyevsky for his social awareness and declared him the literary successor of Gogol. Dostoyevsky joined Belinsky's literary circle but later broke with it when the critic reacted coldly to his subsequent works.

In 1848 Dostoyevsky joined a group of young intellectuals, led by Mikhail Petrashevsky, which met to discuss literary and political issues. In the reactionary political climate of mid-nineteenth-century Russia, such groups were illegal, and in 1849 the members of the so-called Petrashevsky Circle were arrested and charged with subversion. Dostoyevsky and several of his associates were imprisoned and sentenced to death. As they were facing the firing squad, an imperial messenger arrived with the announcement that the Tsar had commuted the death sentences to hard labour in Siberia. This scene was to haunt the novelist the rest of his life. Dostoyevsky described his life as a prisoner in Zapiski iz myortvogo doma (1862; The House of the Dead), a novel demonstrating both an insight into the criminal mind and an understanding of the Russian lower classes. While in prison the writer underwent a profound spiritual and philosophical transformation. His intense study of the New Testament, the only book the prisoners were allowed to read, contributed to his rejection of his earlier liberal political views and led him to the conviction that redemption is possible only through suffering and faith, a belief which informed his later work.

Dostoyevsky was released from the prison camp in 1854; however, he was forced to serve as a soldier in a Siberian garrison for an additional five years. When finally allowed to return to St. Petersburg in 1859, he eagerly resumed his literary career, founding two periodicals and writing articles and short fiction. The articles expressed his new-found belief in a social and political order based on the spiritual values of the Russian people. These years were marked by further personal and professional misfortunes, including the forced closing of his journals by the authorities, the deaths of his wife and his brother, and a financially devastating addiction to gambling. It was in this atmosphere that Dostoyevsky wrote Zapiski iz podpolya (1864; Notes from the Underground) and Crime and Punishment. Viewed by critics as one of his masterpieces, Crime and Punishment is the novel in which Dostoyevsky first develops the theme of redemption through suffering. The protagonist Raskolnikov whose name derives from the Russian word for schism or split is presented as the embodiment of spiritual nihilism. The novel depicts the harrowing confrontation between his philosophical beliefs, which prompt him to commit murder in an attempt to prove his supposed superiority, and his inherent morality, which condemns his actions.

In 1867, Dostoyevsky fled to Europe with his second wife to escape creditors. Although distressing due to financial and personal difficulties, Dostoyevsky's years abroad were fruitful, for he completed one important novel Idiot (1869; The Idiot) and began another Besy (1871-72; The Possessed). Dostoyevsky returned to Russia in 1871 and began his final decade of prodigious literary activity. In sympathy with the conservative political party, he accepted the editorship of a reactionary weekly, Grazhdanin (The Citizen). In his Dnevnik pisatelya (1873-1877; The Diary of a Writer), initially a column in the Citizen but later an independent periodical, Dostoyevsky published a variety of prose works, including some of his outstanding short stories. Dostoyevsky's last work was Bratya Karamazovy (1880; The Brothers Karamazov), a family tragedy of epic proportions, which is viewed as one of the great novels of world literature. Dostoyevsky envisioned this novel as the first of a series of works depicting The Life of a Great Sinner, but early in 1881, a few months after completing The Brothers Karamazov, he died at his home in St. Petersburg.