This Restless House. Citizens Theatre. May 2016

The Oresteia by Aeschylus and This Restless House by Zinnie Harris

The Citizens Theatre in Glasgow, in collaboration with the National Theatre of Scotland, are currently performing a new trilogy of plays by Zinnie Harris, This Restless House, based on the 2500 year old works by Aeschylus, The Oresteia. Before seeing the new plays I went back to look over Aeschylus' work, which for me brings back happy memories of my times visiting and working in Greece. On every trip to Greece I love to tick off ancient sites and the scenes of great dramas and myths. The Oresteia at the time it was first performed was commenting on real events in the Athenian courts of the day, as well as talking about kings, cities and gods that would be known to all in the audience. I have been lucky enough to visit many of the settings from The Oresteia, so before a brief review of This Restless House I have used this as an excuse write about beautiful, wonderful Greece. Ελλάδα, σ'αγαπώ.

(NB If you are unaware of this two and a half thousand year old story, this blog contains spoilers, so look away now.)

The Oresteia by Aeschylus

The origins of Western drama lie in Ancient Greece. Two and a half millenia ago festivals and competitions of drama were taking place and although only a small fraction of these plays have survived to this day, those that have are being endlessly performed, re-imagined and re-told. The oldest surviving intact drama is often thought of as Aeschylus' historical tragedy The Persians. It won a prize at the Dionysian festival at the foot of the Acropolis in 472BCE. By this time its creator had already been writing for 25 years. Only six of Aeschylus' 80-odd plays survive to this day (seven if Prometheus Bound is credited to him). He was in his sixties when he wrote The Oresteia trilogy of connected plays, telling the bloody story of Mycenaean King Agamemnon and his family.

Theatre of Dionysus, Athens, where Aeschylus' plays were often performed

Ancient Greek drama, stories still being told and re-told in Scottish theatres

The three plays of The Oresteia are named after Orestes, son of Agamemnon. They tell the story of a family fated by the bloody history of their ancestors to continue a cycle of violence and revenge. Through the centuries since it was written people have tried to unpick the additions and accretions of subsequent transcriptions, to get back to the 2500 year old original. In 1847 Wagner spoke of the effect it had had on him. It is said that his Ring Cycle was inspired by The Oresteia. George Eliot's character Adam Bede used to sit and read The Oresteia over breakfast and often quoted from it. The oldest book we have in our house is a beautiful 1843 edition of Aeschylus' works, perhaps the edition that Adam Bede was reading.

The Oresteia, 1843 edition

Aeschylus himself was born near Athens in about 545BCE. Although we know him as a writer of tragedies, his epitaph in Ancient Greece spoke only of his valour in the Battle of Marathon, fighting against the Persians in 490BCE, a battle in which his brother was killed. Ten years later he was alive at the time of the Spartan defeat at Thermopylae to Xerxes. He died around the age of 67 whilst in Syracuse in Sicily. It is reputed that he was killed when an eagle dropped a tortoise upon his head, mistaking it for a rock to crack open the shell. A tragic death so bizarre you suspect it may be true.

The Oresteia trilogy of plays were first performed in 458 BCE. They start with a cycle of bloodshed and revenge and end with the world deciding whether it should instead move on from that and accept justice, and the rule of law.

The lion gates at Mycenae

After ten years away King Agamemnon returns to Mycenae, in the Northern Peloponnese, fresh from victory in the Trojan War. He has with him Cassandra, daughter of King Priam of Troy. Before sailing he obeys the gods' command to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia, in order to allow his ships to sail to Troy. With Agamemnon away his wife, Clytemnestra, is in an adulterous relationship with Aegisthus, cousin of Agamemnon. He believes the throne is rightfully his, after Agamemnon's father, Atreus, killed the brother of Aegisthus and fed him to their father Thyestes. The bloody acts of the past ensure that bloody retribution will follow in the future. 

For refusing his advances at the opening of a temple in Corinth, Cassandra, a princess and prophetess, has been cursed by Apollo with the ability to tell the future, but that nobody will believe her prophecies. The original Cassandra complex.

Temple at Corinth, beautiful Acrocorinth behind

The first play ends with Clytemnestra avenging their daughter Iphigenia, swinging her axe and killing her husband Agamemnon, and also Cassandra. She and Aegisthus become rulers of all Argos.

Ancient Argos, atop the hill, 49km from Corinth, 15km from Mycenae

Archaeologist  Heinrich Schliemann saw the events in ancient literature as a guidebook to the Greek world he excavated. In uncovering the city of Mycenae he found several grand tombs and from the contents within declared that he had found the tombs of Cassandra and of Agamemnon. The second play opens at the tomb of Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers. The daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Electra, is discussing revenge with her brother Orestes. Electra convinces him to adopt a disguise and get into the royal palace. There he kills Aegisthus. He falters at the thought of killing his mother, until egged on by the god Apollo. Ridden by guilt he flees, pursued by the Furies (Eumenides), a curse from his mother in female form.

My children stepping into "Agamemnon's tomb" at Mycenae

Orestes kills Clytemnestra, a relief from a Roman sarcophagus, St Petersburg Hermitage Museum

The third play opens in the shrine of Apollo at Delphi where Orestes has fled the Furies. The oracle commands he travels to Athens and stand trial. The goddess Athena organises proceedings there, with a jury of citizens, Apollo as his advocate and the Furies as his accusers. With the jury divided Athena casts the deciding vote in favour of Orestes. The Furies threaten to turn their ire on the city of Athens itself, until Athena placates them with the promise of a place for Athenians to worship them in the city.

Temple of Apollo, Delphi

The cycle of revenge and bloodshed is ended with the rule of law and justice by the state. This final act is set at the Areopagus, the rocky site of a court in the time of Aeschylus. This is just at the foot of the Acropolis. Later the Areopagus was where Paul stood to deliver a famous sermon in Athens. It also gave its name to a prose polemical by Milton in 1644, Areopagitica, opposing censorship and arguing for freedom of speech.

Tourists snake up the Acropolis to the Parthenon, the Areopagus
lies just to the right on this photograph

The original music, dance and spectacle of Greek theatre is lost to us, but the stories live on. We have to re-imagine how the chorus and performers interacted with the story and the audience. The vase below shows a Greek performance of The Libation Bearers, the scene where Orestes is about to slay Clytemnestra, and she exposes her breast that once suckled him saying "Hold, oh child, and have shame." Again and again characters are presented with moral dilemmas where right and wrong are ambiguous. Despite being commanded to act by Apollo, can he kill his own mother? In the background a Fury is already rising, snakes held in her hands. 

Vase showing the Orestes being performed,
from the J. Paul Getty Museum

This Restless House by Zinnie Harris

I really like the photograph used by the Citizens Theatre to advertise the trilogy of plays they have produced, This Restless House, based upon the Oresteia. A family is in turmoil, a blur of movement, apart from the steady gaze of a young daughter at the centre. This is how Zinnie Harris reframes the story, by putting at the centre of it Electra, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra.

Photograph used to advertise This Restless House

The three plays, put on over two performances, have been put in a contemporary setting, with the original place and characters put there. The delicate balancing act of using modern vernacular (and swearing) whilst still giving the characters gravitas works right from the off when we are introduced to the chorus. Three drunken vagrants, witnesses to everything, but largely unseen, with their impotent gnashing of teeth.

Part One, called Agamemnon's Return, opens in what resembles a shabby 1970s working men's club. After the brutal murder of her daughter by Agamemnon, Clytemnestra enters like a drunken cabaret singer, bitter and damaged. When Agamemnon returns from war, the ghost of Iphigenia is always present between them. The fetid atmosphere is built up by the dystonic musical score by Nikola Kojabashia. In Aeschylus' day the violence happens off stage, but here when Clytemnestra stabs the unarmed Agamemnon in his bath he runs naked onto the stage where Clytemnestra finishes butchering him, and unable to escape her fate, kills Cassandra in the process. With female characters the focus of this story, the fates of Iphigenia, Clytemnestra and Electra are now bound together.

(It was around about the point where Clytemnestra was slaughtering her husband that my wife and I remembered that it was our wedding anniversary tonight, an alternative interpretation of "until death us do part".)

Part Two, The Bough Breaks, sees Electra trying to banish the ghost of her father who she feels is tormenting her mother, Clytemnestra. Pouring libations of wine and vodka onto Agamemnon's tomb she meets her brother Orestes who feels damned to avenge his father. Like an unscratchable itch he cannot get this thought from his mind, sleepless and trying to drown it with alcohol he feels powerless to alter his destiny. Putting the female characters to the fore, Electra is the one bold enough to avenge her father when the time comes, Clytemnestra now a shadow of herself, knowing she is fated to eternal damnation. 

In Part Three, called Electra and her Shadow,  the setting has shifted, and it feels like a bit of a clunking gear change, as we move from a world of Ancient Greeks in contemporary garb, to the very real world of a modern psychiatry ward. Electra ended the second act in a seizure and is tormented by demons. Feeling powerless to control them or escape them her psychiatrist tries to show her that she is not a puppet to fate. The empathetic psychiatrist has to confront her own demons and the final scenes give us a version Aeschylus' divided jurors. With ghosts getting to be heard at the end the last scene packs a powerful punch that left me with a tear in the corner of my eye.


The acting, was excellent throughout, grueling in places. Particular mention must go to Pauline Knowles as Clytemnestra, George Anton as a brooding Agamemnon, Olivia Morgan as Electra and Lorn MacDonald as a twitchy Orestes and a gangly chorus member. 

The third part almost stands as a separate play in tone and message, but together the plays are a powerful re-imagining of the words and ideas from Aeschylus. The characters feel that they are doomed by events to follow a certain path, and powerless to change things. Their impotence is self-imposed and they need to be shown to take responsibility for their own actions. Maybe it is just because of the type of people that I work with that I saw a link in all this with those that feel incapable of tackling an addiction such as alcoholism. Drinkers may feel it is an inevitable response to earlier events, drowning out their demons, and then later their headaches, itches, shakes, nightmares and seizures. When drunk, are you still responsible for the actions you take?

In the plays alcohol swills about repeatedly, from louche cabaret singers, to drunk drivers and alcoholic fathers having vodka poured onto their graves. Many characters display textbook symptoms of alcoholism and a powerlessness to change their ways. Is drink now our contemporary god and demons? Well, it has been around for a while, hasn't it? The festivals of Dionysus, where the plays of Aeschylus were first performed, the driving force of Greek theatre, were festivals to the god of wine making and a frenzy of excess.

Anyway, I'll raise a glass to a powerful re-telling of some meaty stories.

Lanark: A Play In Three Acts. Citizens Theatre Company

Lanark: A Play In Three Acts. Citizens Theatre Company. Glasgow, August 2015

(David Greig's adaption of Alasdair Gray's "Lanark" had it's preview showing in Glasgow last night and this is a brief review. If you haven't read the book before going to see the play, and don't want to know the story, look away now as it may contain some spoilers.)

Saturday 15th August promised to be an exciting day. First up Partick Thistle were taking on Kilmarnock in the afternoon at Firhill, followed by the opening night of Lanark, Alasdair Gray's classic book adapted as a play by David Greig at the Citizens Theatre. Both left me with the same nervous feeling of anticipation, hoping that they would live up to my hopes.

The players take their place at Firhill

At Firhill the one character that never disappoints is that one created by an artist. Kingsley the mascot, the work of David Shrigley. This surreal, untalking vision wanders around the ground before games and is greeted as if it is perfectly normal to raise a smile at a piece of spikey sunshine walking around in Maryhill. More people around Britain, around the world even, are able to imagine a club called Partick Thistle from Glasgow now because of the work of an artist (and the ongoing efforts obviously of the man inside the costume). The Guardian had a photographer following Kingsley around for a couple of hours yesterday, so it still goes on.

The football itself was a piece of theatre in three acts. In Act One Partick Thistle were all over an agricultural Kilmarnock team for half an hour, but despite numerous chances only managed to get one goal. Those in the audience who have seen this type of performance before could guess what the final act would bring, as Kris Boyd warmed up on the touchline like Chekov's gun. In Act Two Kilmarnock equalised, and before the interval could have been ahead. Then the referee nudged things along by reducing Thistle to 10 men. In Act Three we were amazed to find hope as Kris Doolan put Thistle in the lead, before Kris Boyd came off the bench to inevitably snuff it out. It was a great game of football...for the neutral, but left a feeling of injustice and of a missed opportunity for those of us of a Partick Thistle persuasion.

"Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself, and the recipe is separation." - Alasdair Gray, Lanark

I don't think Alasdair Gray had the Firhill pies in mind when he wrote that, which today could generously be described as "well fired".

"Boo!"

As a huge fan of his work I've written about Alasdair Gray before, when a series of events and exhibitions celebrated his 80th birthday last year. That year focused largely of his artworks. His first novel, which cemented his reputation, is "Lanark: A Life In Four Books". First published in 1981 it was apparently written over several decades and, as is the case in most of his books, has both words and pictures provided by Gray creating a unified vision. It tells the parallel and intersecting stories of a young man, who takes the name Lanark, awakening in the sunless city of Unthank (which has a passing resemblance to Glasgow), and of a young man called Duncan Thaw (who has a passing resemblance to the author). "A life in four books" their stories are told in the order of book three, one, two then four, with Duncan Thaw's story being sandwiched in the middle of Lanark's when read this way. Neither men truly fit in or understand their worlds, which seals their fate. In an extended epilogue the "author" meets Lanark and discusses the book and the plagiarisms he filled it with (some real, some invented). He tells Lanark that...

"The Thaw narrative shows a man dying because he is bad at loving. It is enclosed by [Lanark's] narrative which shows civilization collapsing for the same reason" 

The book is full of nods to other stories, artists, authors and ideas. An "index of plagarisms" in the margins of the epilogue contains refences as varied as William Blake, Joseph Conrad, Walt Disney, Tom Leonard and HG Wells. Of note is the mention of Robert Burns

"Robert Burns' humane and lyrical rationalism has had no impact on the formation of this book, a fact more sinister than any exposed by mere attribution of sources" 

The artwork of the separate book frontispieces also references those that have gone before such as this from "Book Four". The frontispiece of Hobbes Leviathon is redrawn with a landscape of Scotland in the foreground, complete with Dunoon, Faslane and the Forth Rail Bridge. (If you want a colour print of this beautiful image to own, Alasdair Gray recently reworked these for the Glasgow Print Studio).

Hobbes Leviathon, Lanark Book Four

In this spirit the theatre company have created a wee Pinterest board of plagarisms that they may have used, and they suggest that you look out for more in the play.

One of the main characters in the story is Glasgow, with the necropolis in the East End featuring as a gateway to another world (or to a building resembling Stobhill Hospital if you prefer). The book is witty, political, confusing, poignant, frustrating and brilliant. When I heard that David Greig and the Citizens' Theatre planned to make a stage version of the book the obvious question was "How the hell are they going to manage that?" Some of the challenges that they faced are maybe evident in the fact that the first preview night at the Citizens' had to be cancelled, meaning we were watching it tonight on its opening night in Glasgow, before it transfers to the Edinburgh Festival. David Greig seemed to me a perfect choice to interpret the book. He has had success with adaptions as diverse as Euripides' The Bacchae with National Theatre of Scotland and a musical version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I've enjoyed his plays Dalgety, Dunsinane, The Glasgow Girls and The Events. If you don't already follow David Greig on twitter I would heartily recommend it for terrible puns, political rants and energy sapping tales of his hill running exploits. His works are the kind of things a country can produce when art is funded and supported. To quote Alasdair Gray...

“People in Scotland have a queer idea of the arts. They think you can be an artist in your spare time, though nobody expects you to be a spare-time dustman, engineer, lawyer or brain surgeon.”

In the year that the Citizens Theatre celebrates its 70th anniversary "Lanark: A Life in Four Books" now becomes "Lanark: A Life in Three Acts". Of note in the theatre tonight there was a palpable buzz of excitement amongst the gathered audience. Also they were a more diverse crowd than you often see in the theatre with both young and old drawn to it.

The solutions that they have found to some surreal passages in the book is evident from the first minute with the clever use of projections and animation throughout, often with a nod to the authors original artworks.  Sandy Greirson, who recently played Ivor Cutler on this stage, plays the role of Lanark, and seems to fit the role well. Never manic or hysterical, he presents an essentially good man beneath an emotional carapace.

“He watched them with the passionate regret with which he saw them play football or go to dances: the activity itself did not interest, but the power to share it would have made him less apart.” - Alasdair Gray, Lanark

Jazz tinged music adds an atmospheric sense of place and time as Lanark and the audience arrive in Unthank and a huge degree of choreography goes into revolving the seemingly simple stage set to create a variety of scenes. Greirson is supported by a fantastic ensemble cast, with several well-kent faces from the Scottish stage (Andy Clark, George Drennan, Jessica Hardwick, Paul Thomas Hickey, Louise Ludgate, Helen Mackay and Gerry Mulgrew. Camrie Palmer and Ewan Somers). The first act (Act Two, obviously) finds Lanark trying to work out who he is, trying to fit in and find love in a world where people inexplicably disappear. As his itchy patches of skin inexorably reveal themselves as dragonhide, a metaphorical carapace made real, he descends in a literal sense to a futuristic (in a 1970s Logan's Run type of way) Institute, where those who seem to run the world reside. 

The second act (or Act One - keep up), connects Lanark to Duncan Thaw, the real life of a "Proletarian snob" from the east end of Glasgow determined to be an artist. The cast lead Thaw through his life from the scaffold that becomes Ben Rua and his workplace on an epic church mural. A child with asthma and itchy eczema becomes a man unable to find love and falling into despair and mental illness. Again the script and Greirson don't play this with melodrama but with pathos and an ebbing away of hope.

The final act thrusts us back to Unthank after the characters wander aimlessly and surreally across the Intercalendrical Zone, where the actors break through the theatrical "fourth wall". Whilst civilisation is descending into chaos Lanark must try to save his city and try to connect with his wife and man-child (Ewan Somers doing an impressive turn in the style of Baby Brent from Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs). In the book Gray smashes through the fourth wall with his epilogue to talk to Lanark, on stage this is done in a clever and incredibly imaginative way which chimes so well with the book.

It is a book rammed full of ideas, images, metaphors and devices and it feels as if almost everything in the book has managed to find a place in the play. If you asked 100 different uber-fans of the book which bit had to be kept in for the play you might get 100 different replies. Whilst satisfying the geeks, the play also opens up the book to those who have never got around to reading it in a way that is accessible, whilst entirely in keeping with the unique spirit of the original. That feat may have taken almost four hours of work this evening by all involved in the production, but it was a fantastic and mind-spinning evening of theatre.

"Glasgow is a magnificent city," said McAlpin. "Why do we hardly ever notice that?" "Because nobody imagines living here," said Thaw... "Think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he's already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn't been used by an artist, not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively." - Alasdair Gray

I hope that these words by Alasdair Gray are no longer true and that his works help ignite the creative energy of Glasgow and its people. The play certainly feels like it adds to this legacy.

Alasdair Gray's mural on the wall of Hillhead subway station, Glasgow

Ivor Cutler and Aidan Moffat

Review: The Beautiful Cosmos of Ivor Cutler and Aidan Moffat's "Where You're Meant To Be"

I first started listening to Ivor Cutler's music with my children. The fundraising CD "Colours Are Brighter", aimed at children and adults, had an eclectic selection of artists from Franz Ferdinand to Four Tet and Belle and Sebastian. However the one that got everyone singing along in the car was Ivor Cutler's "Mud". This led us to look up some of his own albums and "Ludo" became a regular for long car journeys. Its surreal, gentle humour appealing to all ages. So when we saw that there was a stage show trying to tell his life story he were keen to get tickets, but with a degree of trepidation as to how they would sum up a man who described himself as "never knowingly understood".

Ludo by Ivor Cutler

However Vanishing Point theatre company and National Theatre of Scotland have co-produced an excellent piece of theatre in The Beautiful Cosmos of Ivor Cutler, currently on at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow before touring. To try to get to know the man behind the person, writer/actor Sandy Grierson interviewed Cutler's partner Phyllis King and recreates these interviews here before the actor literally and metaphorically dons the costume and mannerisms of Cutler. Accompanied by the five onstage musicians they tell the story of his life interspersed with his poetry and interpretations of his songs. It was humorous, and as full of pathos as Cutler's songs and poems. It followed his life from Glasgow childhood, to navigator's training in the air force, art school, life as a teacher, to failing memory in old age. A nice touch was a link to a Spotify playlist of some of the songs which are used in the play, which we listened to in the car on the way to the theatre. This added to my children's enjoyment of the whole show a lot and we've been singing "I Need Nothing, I've Everything I Need." ever since.

Ivor Cutler seated aside yon Paul McCartney fella

There were some really interesting programme notes from Vanishing Point artistic director Matthew Lenton (an Englishman who has moved to Scotland). He wonders whether we still live in a country where ambitious artists like Ivor Cutler have to head south, to London, to follow their dreams. He wonders is "the cultural and political introspection of London" now alienating the rest of the UK? Should Scotland set its own agenda, in the arts, on the NHS, etc? They also have to make it clear that the views expressed are his own and not those of Vanishing Point or National Theatre of Scotland. Theatre seems to be successfully engaging in political issues, whether tangentially as in this case, or more directly (for example in the issue of refugees and asylum seekers in Benjamin Zephaniah's Refugee Boy and David Greig and Cora Bissett's Glasgow Girls, both seen at the Citizens in recent weeks).

Cover art by Aidan Moffat for Malcolm Middleton's HDBA album
(it's not Ludo, it's Frustration)

I think that Aidan Moffat is the nearest thing we have in Scotland today to an "oblique musical philosopher", as Ivor Cutler once described himself. I also hope that we know how to support and nurture our current deadpan poet, musician, artist and storyteller. Any of the tracks on the Scottish Album of the Year award winning album with Bill Wells, "Everything's Getting Older" such as "Dinner Time", could be considered a modern day version of Cutler's "Life in a Scottish Sittingroom".

Aidan Moffat in Tom Weir mode for Where You're Meant To Be

He is currently being employed by us taxpayers as part of the Commonwealth Games 2014 cultural programme, to tour the country re-interpreting Scotland's folk traditions in all their glorious bawdiness. Under the title/command/question, "Where You're Meant To Be" he'll be travelling to the likes of Lewis, the Faslane Peace Camp and Drumnadrochit before finishing off at the Barrowlands in Glasgow. The whole event will be made into a film by Paul Fegan to be shown at the closing of the Games and tickets throughout are free. I was fortunate enough to grab a ticket for the opening night on Monday 14th April, to be serenaded by Aidan and his band on boat down the Clyde, on an unexpectedly balmy Spring evening. Accompanied by James Graham (Twilight Sad), Jenny Reeve (Bdy_Prts) and Stevie Jones (from Alasdair Roberts troupe) who gave us a great wee support set. However the early evening star of the show was the River Clyde. I could not have been happier than to be sailing through Glasgow with clear skies on a beautiful evening with free whisky, and then there was still Aidan Moffat to come!

As we head down the Clyde the sunset is reflected in the Crowne Plaza Hotel

behind the Glenlee ship whilst the full moon rises above the Transport Museum

If Aidan's remit was to modernise some old songs, he has done it with bells on. These old songs are often saucy and daft, but to hear something like the Big Kilmarnock Bunnet redone with a daft laddie from Falkirk set up to meet a lady of the night at Blysthwood Square works a treat (I mentioned this old song recently in a football related jaunt to Kilmarnock). As a Partick Thistle fan I felt a wee bit let down by his re-working of Harry Lauder's "I Love a Lassie" as a different version rings out at Firhill with far worse lyrics than Aidan has conceived to pillory his English father-in-law. However others, such as the Kirriemuir Ball, were just silly, funny and struck the correct chord of modern vernacular, where effin' and blinding are just punctuation marks for most Scots in their normal conversational, away from work voices. Nice to see Cardinal Keith O'Brien up for special mention too in one ditty. Cutler also turned his hand to writing books for children and Mr Moffat for an encore recited from a children's book he has written, to be published soon. As he put it, after all the sex and drinking of the earlier songs, you inevitably end up with children.

Aidan Moffat singing on the boat. It wasn't listing, I was

 At the risk of sounding like a big sook, this was my perfect evening. Free tickets, Scottish nostalgia with a modern, sweary twist, a trip down my favourite river in the world, and me and my brother raising a (free) glass of whisky to the NHS surgeons at the Golden Jubilee Hospital as we passed Clydebank, where a few months ago he underwent exemplary and successful open heart surgery. If you get the chance to catch his show grab it. I don't know when will we see, its like again.

Coming back up river into Glasgow at the end of a great night out.

Dostoyevsky at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow. Review

I need to start this by admitting that I'm a bit of a Dostoyevsky groupie. I first read Crime and Punishment as a teenager and was completely hooked from the start. I turned my back on your Bronte sisters and Jane Austens. For a few years I could see no further than Russian literature and worked my way through Lermontov, Goncharov, Gogol, Turgenev, Gorky and the rest, but mainly the works of Dostoyevsky. Emile Zola and Victor Hugo I allowed myself, treating them as honorary Russians as they also featured sufficient misery and gloom for my tastes.

Ever since then I keep returning to it again and again. Recently I've read Norwegian author Knut Hamsun purely because Gide called him a "Norwegian Dostoyevsky" (wrongly) and read Russian author Vyacheslav Pyetsukh's "The New Moscow Philosophy" because it was supposed to be a "reprise of Crime and Punishment". Again I ended up disappointed. So when I found out that the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow were putting on adaptions of two of Dostoyevsky's books I was delighted, if a little anxious about how that would work out.

When we were on holiday about 9 years ago in Moscow and St Petersburg I ended up, without planning to, turning it into a bit of a Fyodor Dostoyevsky tribute tour. I've got photographs of myself and my children standing in front of Dostoyevsky's statue outside the Lenin Library in Moscow. However it is when you are in St Petersburg that you realise that city is an ever present character in many of his books, none moreso than in Crime and Punishment. Having read the book a couple of times before arriving in the city I was surprised at how grand, clean and open the city was. 

The streets and taverns Raskolnikov inhabited in my mind should have been more like the narrow streets of the Victorian Gorbals, yet here we found wide canals and streets, solid, dignified looking buildings and there was light. Obviously I was visiting a modern city, tidied up for our times but it was hard to put the Raskolnikov of my imagination into these grand streets. His attic flat in the book is described as "under the very roof of a tall five storey building, more like a cupboard than a living room". The descriptions are so real that the flat has been identified at a street called Stolyarny per, a street I had to visit. The spot is now marked by a plaque of Dostoyevsky, climbing the aforementioned stairs. Again this looked like a bright, healthy, solid building more akin to a romantic garret than a claustrophobic hovel. In Dostoyevsky's day there were apparently 22 bars in this street, so maybe that, the tuberculosis and the more crowded living accommodation of his day needs borne in mind. He takes 730 steps from here to get to the pawnbroker's house where he commits his crime. Beside this block a wide canal looks delightful, but apparently at the time stank from the sewage tipped into it and in the book there is reference to suicides throwing themselves into these same canals. 

Again look at this picture I took of the block thought to be where the murder took place, just not what I'd imagined. He runs out of the pawnbrokers house and through a tunnel onto the street beside the canal, so the tunnel in the centre of this block is where I picture it happening now.

 

Pawnbroker premises in St Petersburg?

We retreated to a bar called "The Idiot", named after another of his novels, and I began to feel more the atmosphere of his times. Although the walls inside were white and clean and bookshelves lined them, the arched roof and pillars of this basement bar felt like the kind of tavern in which Raskolnikov might have met Marmeladov. Here we looked up some other Dostoyevsky themed things to see. In 1849 whilst a prisoner of the Tsar for taking part in revolutionary activities, Dostoyevsky was taken to Semyonovsky platz and faced a mock execution.

 

Pionerskaya Ploschad

Now called Pionerskaya Ploschad the square has no feel of an execution site and has all the detritus of a bustling city, but that is as it should be. Glasgow Green in my own city is a place we go to run about and play rather than go to see people being hanged nowadays. He was then taken to a Siberian labour camp where he lived alongside murderers and criminals who inspired his ideas for Crime and Punishment.

 

Dostoyevsky Museum on the first floor

The flat where he lived his later years, and died, is now a museum to the author. Here he wrote The Brothers Karamazov and when we visited the market outside gave a better idea of the bustling streets of the 1860s and 1870s St Petersburg. Nearby, facing Vladimir Cathedral stands a statue to the author and this was the last site I visited on my pilgrimage to Fyodor.

Dostoyevsky statue opposite Vladimir Cathedral, St Petersburg

The point I want to make is that you create a very clear picture in your head when reading a good book, particularly one that you love, of the characters and their environment. This isn't a bad thing, but it needn't necessarily be what the author imagined or any other reader pictures. For this reason when I saw that the Citizens Theatre were doing a production of Crime and Punishment I was delighted but approached it with some trepidation, fearing certain disappointment in seeing a version different from my own. However on re-reading it recently I try to imagine how you could stage it and I find new things in it again. When I first read it I remember his mother being old. Caring but a bit clueless. When I read it again I find that "although Mrs Raskolnikov was forty-three her face still preserved traces of its former beauty". Forty-three! Steady on, Fyodor, that's not exactly ancient! But this is important, Raskolnikov is a young man for whom forty-three is past it. He is full of confidence and ideas and fight. Full of anger. The long passages in the book where he debates with himself seem ideal for a theatrical staging. The detective, Porfiry, is a prototype Columbo who knows despite a lack of evidence who the murderer is, but badgers him into confessing. Some adaptions or re-imaginings work. Then again have you ever seen the 1958 film of The Brothers Karamazov with a young William Shatner playing the monk Alexei Karamazov? Every time he is on screen you expect him to raise an eyebrow and flip open his communicator. I am more hopeful for Richard Ayoade's imminent film adaption of The Double. Not all of his books I can imagine well on stage but the two on show at The Citzens I could certainly see working well. 

Dostoyevsky's actual desk in his actual apartment

As the Citizens were staging adaptions of two books I decided to see them in the order in which they were written. First up was Notes From The Underground, the inaugural production by The Visiting Company starring Samuel Keefe (who I recently saw in The Changeling at Oran Mor, playing a similar angular, nippy sweetie role) and Millie Turner. This is on in one of the Studio Theatre spaces and the dark, small room worked well for the story, even if my back still aches from the blooming seats they have in there. Immediately before writing Crime and Punishment Dostoyevsky penned Notes From The Underground, a short novel in which the author through the monologues of the anonymous narrator berates society. It starts "I am a sick man....I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man. I think there is something wrong with my liver." This bitter character also vents his spleen against the aged - "To go on living after forty is unseemly, disgusting, immoral!" He tells the story of his bleak meeting with former colleagues from school, and later a prostitute, "that 'damned' Liza". He wonders "which is better, a cheap happiness or lofty suffering?"

The character in the book is spiteful, isolated, vengeful, ashamed and weak. Not an easy role to play and expect sympathy from the audience, but Keefe does it with aplomb and shows the vulnerability and insecurities of this man. He may be making his "notes" with an iPad or mobile phone rather than pen and paper but, using much text from the original book, little updating is required to maintain his existential angst in our modern times. Feeling humiliated from above and powerless against his superiors, he turns around and takes his anger out on someone weaker than himself. The book was conceived by Dostoyevsky whilst imprisoned and the "grief and disintegration" he felt there is surely just as resonant in today's society. It is clear that the "Underground Man" wallows in lofty suffering rather than trying to enjoy cheap happiness. That is to be what Raskolnikov has in store for himself too. Notes From The Underground was written as a bitter rebuttal of Utopian Socialist Chernyshevsky's novel What Is To Be Done? Dostoyevsky disagreed with these ideas that mankind would achieve happiness by acting with enlightened self interest. This book (the title of which was later borrowed by Lenin as the title of a more practical "How to do revolutions" pamphlet) is prominent again in the production of Crime and Punishment.

This production of Crime and Punishment is co-produced by The Citizens, Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse and Royal Lyceum Theatre companies and written by Chris Hannan. The ten strong cast are always on stage, milling around or playing the accompanying music, giving a good atmosphere of the bustling city within the book. Adam Best plays Raskolnikov with all the hunger, anger and poverty required. His friend Razumikhin is played by the fabulous Obioma Ugoala in a way that would make anyone gratefully take him as their best friend. George Costigan plays Porfiry's Colombo role whilst avoiding the tics of Peter Falk as much as possible. A lot of detail from the first half of the book is crammed in, as Raskolnikov puts forward his case that the extraordinary human is above the law if he acts for the common good. The second half slows a little, and his eventual confession, shouted out in the street, is maybe more dramatic, but in the end less powerful than the chain of events which bring him to confess in the book. He heads to a place the author knew only too well, the Siberian prison camps. I really loved getting an excuse to dust off my old Dostoyevsky books. Reading them a decade on from last time I see new things in the books again, and they are as relevant to our times as any other. That was something that both plays managed to convey.

Raskolnikov/ Dostoyevsky may not always have been right, but he had an idea and set out to prove its worth. “To go wrong in one's own way is better then to go right in someone else's.”