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....
Adam Best (Raskolnikov), Crime and Punishment, Citizens Theatre, Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse and Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh
