Audience members will feel many things at the end of this ridiculous take on The Brothers Karamazov but delirium is unlikely to be one of them. Unbounded relief at the thought that these seemingly interminable two and a half hours are over will almost certainly prevail.
Quite whom Theatre O and playwright Enda Walsh thought they might appeal to with this updating of Dostoevsky’s dysfunctional father-sons relationship is unclear. Lovers of the novel will be horrified that its complexity has been reduced to something resembling a freak show in Joseph Alford’s frenetic production. Yet for those unfamiliar with the original, the set-up here is nigh-on incomprehensible and no amount of songs and puppet shows can right this fundamental wrong.
Through the centrifugal murk, one plot strand emerges with greater clarity than the others. The men of the family — tyrannical father Fyodor and his adult offspring by different mothers — are all somehow tangled up with two women, Katerina (passionate Carolina Valdés) and Grushenka, played by Julie Bower as a singing minx.
Happiness does not ensue, yet it’s hard to care since Walsh hasn’t bothered to convey what might be at stake for any of these sketchily drawn characters.
All too often Dostoevsky’s moral and spiritual quest is reduced to insufficiently anchored outbursts of religious philosophising. I heartily recommend saving the ticket money and buying the Penguin Classics edition of the text instead.
Until 22 November (020 7638 8891,
www.barbican.org.uk).
Delirium
Barbican: The Pit
Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS
