DOSTOYEVSKY IN DALTON
“These days” says the person on the empty stage, “people are precious to me, even when they insult me. I have woken up”. His stark options don’t smile as he says it, as a result of he has an pressing stoey to inform. Greg Hicks, restlessly prowling with a suitcase, making himself shabby, explains how he made a profession, made pals, misplaced each because it dawned on him that ‘human existence is an sad accident in a malign universe”, and that there isn’t a purpose for something. He evokes a Dalston pub the place persons are drunk, quarrel, giggle at him and each other; the streets he crosses uncaring amid lights and horns (transient skilful projections, flashes, sounds off). He tells of assembly a determined little one asking for assist, and ignoring her as a result of nothing issues. He evokes the bedsit the place round him different determined folks wait hopelessly for ambulances, and prepares to shoot himself within the head. Pausing, horrifyingly, to take the gun from his mouth and a reminiscence of lovelier issues, the plaintive Irish “She moved through the fair”. And he falls asleep, and desires.
This theatre has, in its launching months, developed a deliberate really feel for the Eastern European soul: a exceptional Russian/Ukrainian story of the Polish WW2 ghetto in The White Factory, one other story of a wartime Polish forest in The Most Precious of Gifts; in a couple of weeks comes Gogol’s Government Inspector. And now, hauntingly extraordinary, this quick story by Fyodor Dostoyefsky. It’s tailored , and moved from previous Petersburg to fashionable East London by Laurence Boswell. He additionally directs it, grippingly, with Loren Elstein’s starkly arresting design and completely the best-chosen solo actor..
For Greg Hicks is a phenomenon, an RSC and nationwide theatre veteran however exotically un-English in expression : he has a form of menacing grace, not fairly balletic (nearer certainly to the Brazilian fight-dance of capoeira, during which he’s adept) . To each position he has introduced that unsettling distinction, to good impact whether or not as Lear or the terrifying newspaper editor in Clarion . Here, he turns into the wandering witness narrator of the deepest fact. HIs dream takes him to a paradise, an island the place easy folks stay with out worry , lust or deceit. It is evoked with delicate lights and projections, all nonetheless earlier than the curtain which has not lifted. His gravity, barely smiling even in surprise however intense, expressive in each limb, holds it away from romantic absurdity although it’s the oldest trope of spiritual philosophers: the sinless Eden. But the second oldest is in fact corruption – the serpent, Pandora’s Box opened.
Awakening – the entire stage behind him out of the blue broader, revelling in his happiness at this discovery that human beings are born pure and good – he pauses, the gun forgotten, however has painfully to inform the remainder of the dream: that it was he who spoilt the Paradise. Lightly flirting, he taught them to deceive and revel in deceiving. From that flowered lust, then jealousy, cruelty, worry, the forming of teams, suspicion, blame, disgrace, denunciation , patriotism, conflict. Remembering, he turns into a tyrant rallying all these evils with glee (very Trump, Stalin, Putin). And startlingly concludes, as Dostoyevsky did, not that mankind is evil however that it doesn’t have to be. So his job is to say so..
Hicks holds us for 75 minutes; each light-change or transient projection judged to the second. It’s exhausting typically to work out what a “five-star” evaluation is for , however typically all it means is that here’s a factor of nice simplicity, portrayed with good judgement to grow to be delicate and unforgettable.
marylebonetheatre.com to 20 April
Rating 5
