Arts

Essential viewing

Giles Gordon

Crime and Punishment (Lyric, Hammersmith) Moliere (RSC: The Pit) The Shelter (Lyric Studio, Hammersmith)

Senseless (ICA) Yuri Lyubimov's inexorable recreation of his 1978 Taganka Theatre, Moscow staging of Crime and Punishment in an in- cisive English version by Nicholas Rzhevsky and performed by an exemplary British cast is not exactly an everyday tale of St Petersburg folk. Nevertheless, forget Dostoevsky's realistic novel, particularly if you're allergic to the recycling of master- pieces, Bill Paterson's sinister, dangerously comic Porfiry stalks his prey, Michael Pen- nington's emaciated, parchment-faced Raskolnikov, until — using a noose as a magnifying glass — he traps him. Yet this is no existentialist production, rather a Chris- tian rendering more concerned with charity than justice although blood will have blood and justice, following confession, is seen to be done. 'One can have compassion for the criminal but one can't call evil good,' says the rational if oilily smug Edinburgh lawyer that is Mr Paterson's crab-like Porfiry.

Almost from the start, Mr Pennington's pawnbroker murderer is more petrified vic- tim of society than the Napolean of crime he purports to be, an obsessive being beyond and above the law. There is deep despair in his voice, his mind apparently apart from his Christ-like physique, a tree of man. This Christian interpretation is heightened by Adison Denisov's music which veers from the sweetest of lingering strings to cathedral bells to the tawdry um- pah-pah of a circus band. Never has music been less incidental to a production: it derives from the characters' fears, splinters out of and into their innermost thoughts.

Likewise the lighting which, laser-like, sears into and out of the exploding passions and tensions depicted on stage. David Borovsky dresses the stage in black, and the costumes are dark. The shafts of stage-level lighting are incessantly, inevitably thrust into the faces of the actors, somehow illuminating their souls.

Mr Lyubimov apparently speaks no English, yet he has nursed or conjured from his cast performances of a kind and quality that are unique, unique in that they are alien to our tradition of acting being de- rived from an exhaustive exploitation of technique rather than falling back on per- sonality (although, paradoxically, Mr Pen- nington's deranged, hopeless protagonist is an extension of his Hamlet). The actors are not allowed to fall back on easy man- nerisms, or anything actorish and as a result performers of the calibre of Christopher Guinee (Marmeladov), Paola Dionisotti (his wife), Nicholas Farrell (Razumikhin), Sheila Reid (Raskolnikov's mother), Veronica Roberts (Sonia), Bill Stewart (Luzhin) and Gary Waldhorn (Svidrigailov) add to their individual range as actors and, collectively, people the stage with beings we hadn't believed our tradition and culture capable of achieving.

The few props — waterjug, basin, vodka, bottle, glass, newspapers, murderer's axe, candle and candle flame in broken window, candles and candle flames confessing and saving the world — create and evoke a society, individual lives. Above all, the recurring image of this imagist production: the door of Raskolnikov's room, its ears and its mouth, eyes too; bed and coffin, ultimately the very entrance to hell, Raskolnikov is hurtled about the stage (the strobe is brilliantly used), pinioned to bloodstained door, trapped by it. And another door in the blackcloth makes it clear that even in the coffin that is the in- dividual's room there is no privacy as long as a man lives. Mankind cannot be denied society.

I have only hinted at the heights and depths, the glories of Yuri Lyubimov's Crime and Punishment. It is essential view- ing.

'They can't touch me on stage, can they?' stutters Mikhail Bulgakov's terrified

Moliere (Antony Sher) in his Palais-RoYal dressing room before his final performance — in his own Imaginary Invalid and ill al play. He believes that, to the actor (wine Moliere was as well as playwright), grease' paint and stage are as much sanctuary as 1,14 incense-pervaded altar to the religious. Tne irony here is that his sometime mistress and help-meet for 20 years, Madeleirl,e (Penelope Beaumont), dies immedialeY after confessing to the Machiavellian atc,h, bishop (David Bradley: Velasquez, Greco and Bacon cardinals squeezed i111°. one) that Moliere's wife, Armande (Sat° Mair-Thomas), is not her younger sister be her daughter. Likewise, Moliere is litell,11! frightened to death by a one-eyed Mt's"- at the Moscow Arts Theatre in 1936, ae, Dusty Hughes's new version (premiered a' Stratford-upon-Avon last summer) ously underlines the parallels between ti17 Sun King's court and Uncle Joe Stain° Russia. Annena Stubbs dresses th,e monarch (John Carlisle) and his court 1° glittering apparel, and Ralph Koltai's set is dominated by a colossal head ° M lie

o re.

Antony Sher as the odiously sycoplialit,ic, and aggressive playwright, hounded bY church for writing Tart uffe, as usual incor- porates in his performance every trick he must ever have learnt about the art of acit: ing but, unlike Olivier, he still lac:: physical and moral conviction. His Molierd' — as his Tartuffe, as his Fool — is bits pieces, pasted not welded together, a'r: Autolycus of a performance. The charaetd, doesn't grow with inevitability from a or seething centre, Olivier on stage Mt always be Olivier, as Sher, apparetillY, , always Sher but Olivier also invariablY becomes the part. Mr Sher who is no me actor, should stop competing in ,..r decathlon every night. Bill Alexander directs an intelligent if, ultimately, ftlug„": evening, and I'm not referring to the

ing self-playing harpsichord.

Judging by the soundtrack, Roy Pl°r°2,/Ye appears — in The Shelter — 7,ae marooned an 18th-century noble sav,75 (Rudolph Walker) and a mannet1e'l, English lady (ping-pong-ball-eyed Ka t h Pogson) on a desert island before, after, tr interval, transporting them 200 years late to a London pub with juke box. Fer113,,s Jules Wright directs male Caryl PhiliPP' banal play, tortoise-like. As for Lumiere & Son's Senseless, rename it Vacuous and certainly Prete ,,,h; tious. The first half deludes itself and "'is audience that the kind of language which te de rigueur for opera librettos is adeelna, when there's no music to muffle the wor„us,; The story is drivel, about a spy exceenak's his brief and going mad. He then believer, doctors and nurses are the Virgin (Nee and her court. I left soon after the actors:ei in fact opera singers — burst into paslie% modernist song, confident that our oPe1; critic sitting across the aisle would feel les jaundiced or sceptical than me.

teer (Malcohn Storry). Bulgakov's Mofiere was first perfornil