Toronto Star, June 04, 2005
Sherman takes on Dostoevsky — and loses
By: Richard Ouzounian
The production of The Brothers Karamazov that opened yesterday afternoon at the Tom Patterson could best be described as an unnecessary piece of theatre.
Why did playwright Jason Sherman feel the need to turn Fyodor Dostoevsky's grand and sweeping novel into a play?
That's the major mystery that lingers in your mind long after the final curtain has fallen and most of the rest of the experience has faded away.
It's hard to imagine what would attract a playwright whose major strengths are his political conscience and his ear for contemporary dialogue to a story of 19th-century Russia that is primarily an exploration of the nature of good and evil in the human soul.
The original work is a densely constructed book of more than 1,000 pages. To stage it in under three hours means losing not only much of the major content, but depth and texture as well.
The story of horrible patriarch Fyodor Karamazov and his four sons — sensual Dmitry, intellectual Ivan, mystic Alyosha and wretched Smerdyakov — is not filled with fast-moving events that translate well to the stage. Nor is it constructed with the kind of eminently speakable dialogue and amusing characters that make Jane Austen a page-to-stage favourite.
This is the kind of rich material that needs to expand inside your brain at its own speed, not be forced to race rapidly to the next moment.
The next problem is one of tone. Sherman doesn't go for a consistently contemporary style of speech, but still he can't stop himself from slipping into anachronisms and we get phrases like "you must be uber-bad" and "get the money up front."
These don't sit well with the kind of tale being told, nor do Sherman's slips into very modern-sounding profanity, such as "you f----ing whore" and "you contemptible piece of s---." It's almost as though, for Sherman, a play without four-letter words is like a day without sunshine.
And of course, anyone who tries to adapt this work has to deal with the story of The Grand Inquisitor, the book's literal and thematic centre.
It's a fantastic piece of writing that must be taken on its own terms and not turned into a kind of folksy anecdote, as it is here.
If Sherman's script fails the source material, it must be said that Richard Rose's production tries hard to make it look theatrical. There's a bit too much actors-moving-chairs-that-we'll-imagine-are-other-things for my taste, but he does fill the Patterson Theatre's long horizontal stage with interesting pictures and arresting transitions.
The actors work extremely hard trying to fill the outline they've been given with the illusion of complexity.
Jonathan Goad does best as the dissolute Dmitry, creating a character who combines contemporary accessibility with period depth. Goad is always thinking on stage; you have to follow him every moment to keep up with the journey. It makes for exciting theatre.
Ron Kennell's Smerdyakov sneers and Shane Carty's Ivan sputters, and that's about all you get. Peter van Gestel is initially striking as the saintly Alyosha, but eventually grows monotonous. And Scott Wentworth's Fyodor has moments of passionate interest, but hasn't been conceived by Sherman and Rose on a grand enough scale to allow that intensity to be sustained.
Sherman largely reduces the novel's complex female characters to his typical assortment of bitches and bimbos, with Michelle Giroux's Katerina (bitch) and Dana Green's Grushenka (bimbo) two obvious examples.
Throughout the play, you sit there waiting for something exciting to happen, something illuminating to occur, but you wait in vain.
But if this production of The Brothers Karamazov sends you back to the novel, then it will not have been totally in vain.