CATS 2014: Shortlist for Male actor and Thoughts

BEST MALE PERFORMANCE:

Adam Best (Raskolnikov), Crime and Punishment, Citizens Theatre, Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse and Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh
Looking pretty hardcore in this photo (credit: Tim-Morozzo), Best got to play a dream part: the existential hero of Dostoevsky's novel that saved me from wondering whether it was okay to break the law if I was cool enough (it isn't). A big role, that addressed the audience on matters philosophical and went increasingly wild as the guilt heated up, Best's performance was an intriguing mix of bad-ass and sensitive poet. Just like Raskolnikov himself...






Jimmy Chisholm (Bob Lawson), The Collection, Rapture Theatre in association with the Beacon Greenock

While Tam Dean Burn played the guy you really wouldn't want turning up to the door, Chisholm pulled on his natural stage presence to present Bob Lawson, Scotland's answer to that one in Death of A Salesman. In a play that is earnest and horrific (shades of the fast-talking bastards who hide behind lovely adverts for extortionate loans), Lawson's tragedy is the problem of giving a shit in an industry of shits. 

Sandy Grierson (Ivor Cutler), The Beautiful Cosmos of Ivor Cutler, Vanishing Point and the National Theatre of Scotland presented in association with Eden Court
Being Ivor Cutler was always going to be a tough gig: add in (Grierson's own co-written) version of the man, who dances in his imagination, and a storytelling structure that has Grierson jump between himself and Cutler, then Grierson had a showcase for versatility. Sometimes he was Ivor the confused older man, sometimes the laconic singer, other times the cheeky outsider. 

Scott Reid (Thomas), A Perfect Stroke, A Play, a Pie and a Pint presented by the Traverse Theatre Company
A month after seeing this, I can't decide whether Reid's Thomas was a victim or predator. It's a tough ask to play a schoolboy having at go at seducing the teacher, and Reid's big red face when he got angry suggests he'll be playing Lear at some point in the future. With McKnight's script awkward and subtle, Reid's role was pivotal for the sense of sexual unease. He is doing some acting exercises in the photo (credit:  Lesley Black), I think. Perfectly innocent

Crime, Punishment and Collection

Although The Citizens' production of Crime and Punishment and Rapture's revival of The Collection are separated by scale (one has a stage full of cast members flipping between roles, the other is a terse three hander), they share several themes and preoccupations. Debt is a motivating factor for both, and the plots are both driven by guilt and desperation. That they are set in such different times only emphasises the commonality of these problems, yet it is in the adaptation of Dostoevsky's novel that these matters can lead to redemption: The Collection's contemporary fable is far more fatalistic.

Both Chris Hannan and Dominic Hill have made particular efforts to avoid framing Crime and Punishment as a Christian text: Hannan observes that the final scene could be a conversion experience from any number of religious traditions. However, Dostoevsky had no such ecumenical agenda and Hannan's script follows the original novel's interest in a very Orthodox theology. In the world of Raskolnikov, religion and atheism are at war, and the vivid descriptions of social exclusion are set within a universe haunted by the holy.

Mike Cullen's script for The Collection gives God little attention: if anything is worshipped, it is money. The foul-mouthed and mostly lecherous debt collectors have a limited vision of the world - there are the predator and creditors and even when one of their number begins to recognise compassion, his solutions are determinedly materialistic. Even for 1995, and in a Scotland that remains, in many ways, still in thrall to religious organisations, The Collection inhabits a godless universe where morality is defined by success, not abstract law.

Hannan states that the brilliance of Dostoevsky is in his ability to understand both atheist and believer - his own life saw him experience both states. Although nineteenth century Russia was gripped by a Christianity that was conservative even by the standards of the era - Catholicism was responding to 'modernism' by resistance and the protestant movements were making tentative steps towards a theology based on historiography - Dostoevsky's vision of the divine was radical: summed up by Hannan's elegant reworking,this spirituality encourages an internal change. And it is this inspiration that lends Crime and Punishment its happy ending. Redemption is possible, even as justice works out the punishment.

Taken together, The Collection and Crime and Punishment offer competing versions of reality and morality. Ironically, they reassert the importance of religious belief as a foundation for change. The Collection, despite ending in tragedy, sees the play end on the same pessimistic note as it begins (a story from the first scene is concluded, bitterly, in the last). Cullen's offices and homes are stuck in a brutal cycle, as the debt collectors stalk the land, taking what they please with the power of ancient kings. The absence of any alternative to capitulation to their desires drives debtors to despairing strategies - and the seduction of the youngest collector, played by Tam Dean Burn - is a reiteration  of how the system inevitably corrupts.

Crime and Punishment refuses an ending that escapes human justice, but at least points to hope. In a stunning speech - unanswered by the religion within the play - Raskolnikov points out that the universe is merely matter and lacks any moral impetus. This understanding of nature, a matter of controversy in Crime, is tacitly accepted by The Collection. And while Raskolnikov ponders whether he has the right to commit an immoral action, the debt collectors see them as a matter of course.

Both plays share an interest in linking money with morality, noting how its influence corrupts. Cullen's play is bleaker, and harsher while Dostoevsky appeals to a God who is most present in a sense of absence. In the tension between these two pieces, serious questions about how morality is defined  begin to emerge. The religious is no longer an empty appeal to vague spiritual entities, and the mechanics of debt collection are set into a broader social context. Either way, this is how theatre can speak to its times,  and become part of meaningful social conversation.

And it was Rapture that had the Citizens Advice Bureau waiting outside....

Here is my crime...

Although I frequently claim that the critic cannot be objective, I still find it difficult to identify my own subjectivity. Having now written a preview for The List and a review of Crime and Punishment, I am just about able to see a sliver of the preconception that I am bringing to Dominic Hill's direction of Chris Hannan's adaptation.

My first question for Hill offers a small clue: I am quite clearly attached to the original. I am torn between my respect for Hill's previous Citizens' directions (Beckett, Shakespeare and Pinter all delivered precisely and respectfully, but with flair) and my fear that adapting an already famous novel feeds into a theatre culture that already has too many repeats.

GKV: How do you feel about doing adaptations of the stage of a novel that has a strong reputation? In a way, it is a shift from your usual approach of taking great scripts and giving them a new vigour: my assumption is that there is something about C and P that made you go for it...

DH: I've always loved the theatricality of the novel - the characters, the dramatic scenes that Dostoevsky creates, the story, the interior monologues of Raskolnikov. It seemed right for the stage. And it doesn't feel like a departure for me - in fact a fusion: a classic story given contemporary relevance as well as being a new play.

Hill put my fears at rest (and the news that there would be live Orthodox psalms sung on stage swung me further behind the production). But my follow up question gets to the heart of my problem.

GKV: The release says that it has a modern relevance, and I guess that Crime never goes out of fashion, but I am wondering whether Dostoevsky's angle, which is in this slightly unfashionable Christian existentialist mode, makes the moral impact of the play more compromised in the more secular twenty-first century. How do you relate its values and (fairly austere) understanding of C and P to more contemporary ideas?

DH: For me its a story about a man's reintegration into society, about the need for society: no man is an island et c. And about compassion and valuing life, regardless whose life it is. Those themes are encapsulated in a Christian humanism that the story propagates. But whether you're a Christian or not - these are timeless important themes and values that go beyond the confines of any religion and are relevant to any person living in any society.

Even if I don't agree with Hill's assertion that certain values 'go beyond the confines of any religion,' his point is coherent and well-made. It is also supported by Hannan's comments on the Vile Arts' Radio Hour that the conversion experienced by Raskolnikov can be seen in all manner of traditions (he references William Jmaes' Varieties of Religious Experience). And the final scene of the play places this conversion (away from an almost nihilistic atheism towards a more compassionate reading of human life) in a context that is not specifically Christian. Raskolnikov finds his redemption in observing nature and reflecting. This could be pagan, pantheist or even a version of romanticism.

However, that finale was, for me, the least satisfying part of a superb production. The role of Sonya, the prostitute, becomes less important (I suggested that the lack of chemistry between Sonya and Raskolnikov caused this problem). While I am absolutely stand by this - and I don't blame director, actors or author for it- I wonder whether that is my own subjectivity, my resistance to Crime and Punishment as anything other than a Christian parable, that gave me the problem.

For the record, Crime and Punishment is a tour de force - the direction is imaginative and, when taken alongside Hill's King Lear suggests that he is working towards a recognisable style that pays respect to Brecht and the ideals of the Dogme film manifesto. Every cast member works hard, there are many exceptional scenes, especially when the law begins to close in on the idealistic murderer. Hannan respects Dostoevsky's obsession with ideas, and the script has enough philosophy for a month's conversations on issues of justice, freewill, redemption and the meaningless universe.

Even my dissatisfaction is slight. Sonya's character is pretty difficult for a contemporary reader, even in the novel (a Gospel reading sex worker seems to be too symbolic, too forceful a message). In some ways, it even improves my experience: my rejection of both Hill's and Hannan's universality of values clearly exposes my own world view. I don't believe in universal values, or that redemption can come outside of a certain set of religious behaviours. 

Fascinated as I am by my contradictions, I won't follow them up just now. I am content to reveal the possibility that I can be subjective, recognise it but still not take it into account. It could be that this restless self-examination undermines my critical project... I prefer to think not...