Toronto Sun, June 08, 2005
Karamazovs take to the stage
By: John Coulbourn
It has taken far too long, but Richard Monette, artistic director of the Stratford Festival, has finally quit torturing his audiences with attempts to convert the gold of classic literature into the dross of "family entertainment."
Hounded, no doubt, by the enraged spirits of The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Count Of Monte Cristo, to name but a few of his victims, Monette has taken a new, far more respectful approach to classic literature this season.
That's good news, not just for fans of classic literature but also for fans of quality theatre.
There is something for both groups in the stage adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov that opened with little fanfare on the intimate stage of the Tom Patterson Theatre during last week's opening extravanganza.
Wrought by Canadian playwright Jason Sherman and directed by Richard Rose, Brothers emerges as one of the more satisfying collaborations in a frankly lacklustre week.
In Sherman's hands, Dostoevsky's masterwork emerges as a pretty basic murder mystery, buoyed by searching questions of religion, philosophy and politics, both global and familial.
The murder in question is that of Fyodor Karamazov, played by Scott Wentworth, a dissolute and drunken member of the petty aristocracy.
Of the deceased's four sons -- Shane Carty as the revolutionary Ivan, Jonathan Goad as the soldier Dmitry, Peter van Gestel as the religious Alyosha and Ron Kennell as the bastard Pavel Smerdyakov -- suspicion for the murder falls on the second, largely because he and his father were in love with the same woman (Dana Green.)
But as the story unfolds, with Kennell serving as narrator -- long overdue casting that allows a very talented actor to rise above his physicality and demonstrate his depth as a performer -- it becomes an exploration not just of family dynamics but of social and political dynamics as well.
Working with an adaptation that is more likely to send its audience to the book than actually nail it to the stage, director Rose transforms it into a thoughtful piece of theatre.
Thanks to designer Charlotte Dean, it is firmly anchored by its Russian roots, marked by a strong sense of grace and an often understated elegance that proves Rose to be a director with whom to conjure, at least when he is kept at a sufficient remove from Shakespeare and his ilk.
It is not a perfect production. A play can never satisfy in the same way as a novel, and further, the company simply lacks the depth for it, when even such a seasoned veteran as Wentworth seems to think he has been cast as a standup comic.
But in its attempt to convert classic literature into theatre instead of box office and in its commitment to both media, it earns our respect and admiration, managing to hold a committed audience spellbound along the way.
That it leaves us wondering why a talented Canadian playwright like Sherman feels he has to hide behind someone else's story to get his work produced on the Stratford stage is, however, another question entirely.