Campbell and Columbus strip Dostoyevsky’s novel to its bones, producing 90 minutes of strong theater that zeroes in on the question of human redemption. Using just three actors in a production that recalls RHT’s similarly minimal two-person The Turn of the Screw, it remixes the story of feckless student Raskolnikov—who kills the crabbed pawnbroker Alyona, buries his robber’s booty, and ultimately confesses his crime— into a fractured narrative, one fitted around the biblical story of resurrected Lazarus. Roskolnikov cannot explain the reason for this crime to his friend, the prostitute Sonya, not even to himself, and that is perhaps his defining tragedy. Whether he can step from the grave of his crime into salvation is a question left for us to answer in the lobby.
The production is well-served by Robin Stapley’s set, a tilted disc threatening to spill its one set piece (a perilously trapezoidal chair) forward into the house, like some bleak Cezanne tabletop; the disc is surrounded along its upstage half with irregular lucite panels, slightly reflecting: the whole effect suggests a Hadean hockey rink of the soul. Likewise the show’s music, provided by the Bergonzi String Quartet, establishes the right mood of tension and introspection.
Aubrey Deeker’s shabby übermensch Raskolnikov (he is a stripling Napoleon in a long dirty coat, a Russian Dylan Klebold) evokes the right mix of emotions: sufficient disgust that we might question whether he deserves rebirth, mixed with enough pity that his saving can feel appropriate. The deft mind games played by Mitchell Hébert’s detective Porfiry Petrovich suggest a 19th-century Frank Pembleton. And RHT newcomer Tonya Beckman Ross manages her transitions from confessor Sonya to rebarbative Alyona to slightly daft Lizaveta with grace.
- Crime and Punishment, adapted by Marilyn Campbell and Curt Columbus from the novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, directed by Blake Robison, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Md.