The Globe and Mail, June 06, 2005
Karamazovs need modern inquisition
By: Kamal Al-Solaylee
In her now-classic analysis of The Brothers Karamazov, Joyce Carol Oates described Dostoevsky's masterpiece as "a novel in the making, a novel as it is being written, in the very process of being imagined." It is not crudely improvised, she added, but "well planned," and "blocked out in a general pattern of point and counterpoint."
Replace novel with play and Oates might as well be talking about Jason Sherman's adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov. This is still a production in the making: It has invested heavily in a suitable shape but is still searching for content to fill it.
The tentative nature Oates detects in Dostoevsky's writing, however, is that of an author struggling to reconcile a traditional Christian view of the world (redemption through suffering and love) with more challenging ideas (Marxist or Nietzschean thought). Sherman's and director Richard Rose's struggle is of a more practical nature. How do you domesticate a beast of 800 dense pages into a theatre-friendly creature whose lifespan can't exceed three hours? And how do you do it without getting crushed by the tsunami-like intensity of main and subplot details, a gallery of complex characters and pages of searing philosophical debates?
Give Sherman and Rose their due for trying, but there has to be more to it than what they left us with at the end of Friday afternoon's opening. It's not easy adapting novels to the stage -- a faithful adaptation like this one is inevitably an act of reducing a meatier source to bare bones -- but some aspects of The Brothers Karamazov have an inherent theatrical quality. After all, a novel where competing views of the world are split among its titular brothers hands the adaptor a ready-made, character-driven device.
There's Dmitry (a spellbinding Jonathan Goad), the impulsive but honourable former soldier; Ivan (a solid Shane Carty), the tortured intellectual; Alyosha (a sympathetic Peter van Gestel), the Christian believer; and Smerdyakov (Ron Kennell in yet another patented outsider performance), the illegitimate son who stands for our dark, uninhibited and uncensored nature. And in organizing the novel around a patricide -- the murder of the father, Fyodor (a wasted Scott Wentworth), by one of the brothers -- and ensuing trial that follows, Dostoevsky passes to Sherman a dramatic lineage that runs from Oedipus Rex to Hamlet to any courtroom drama you care to mention.
Sherman is clearly picking up on the trial motif. The adaptation is structured as a series of testimonies, eyewitness accounts and re-enactments in an imagined but continuously shifting courtroom. It allows Rose his trademark organic and fluid direction, which gives continuity to a series of interruptions, and a whole to fragmented pieces and split perspectives. Designer Charlotte Dean has coloured the production in more shades of brown (to misquote an Ira Gershwin lyric from But Not for Me) than any Russian play could guarantee. "It lets us be at one with the Tom Patterson stage," she writes in her designer's notes, thus enhancing the feeling of continuity and unity.
But unity of what exactly? What the adaptation has to say about the moral questions in the novel or how they relate to us today -- which I assume is why the Stratford Festival has commissioned an adaptation -- is unclear or, to echo Oates, is still being imagined. All the energy has gone into giving shape to a script that merely follows in the footsteps of the narrative's salient points, a study guide in place of a guided study of the novel.
Only in those moments when Sherman's voice (a profanity here, a glib remark there) comes out from under the weight of period dialogue, do we get a glimpse of a welcome tension between an adaptor and the original author of the work. Elsewhere, it's just a matter of going through the motions, or flipping through the pages, of a major novel for no intellectually convincing reason.