Raising the Dead adapted by Humphrey Bower, May 9, 2007

Raising the Dead 

Adapted by Humphrey Bower from Fyodor Dostoyevsky

La Mama,  May 9 to 20, 2007

Reviewer: Kate Herbert on May 9, 2007

Adaptation of any novel for the stage requires extensive editing and an inventive restructuring of the text as dialogue. 

Humphrey Bower takes short excerpts from two novels by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (The Devils and The Brothers Karamazov) to create his monodrama, Raising the Dead.

Bower, accompanied by haunting vocals and violin by Jess Ipkendanz (OK), addresses the audience directly in a carefully delivered and intimate vocal style that conjures an intense and sinister atmosphere. He lounges on a single chair or perches on a step beside an audience member, engaging us as co-conspirators in this cruel character’s guiltless confessions.

The reflections and reminiscences of this sinister and totally amoral man based on Stavrogin’s Confession from The Devils, are interlaced with extracts from The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor from The Brothers Karamazov.

Bower’s character is both seductive and repellent, his piercing gaze pinning us like a butterfly on a collector’s board. Although the half-whispered tone becomes a little repetitive, it has the effect of heightening the menace of this man.

There is occasional physicalisation of the text with gesture and Bower prowls like a cat around the small stage, immersed in partial darkness and dim evocative lighting (Gwendolyna Holmberg Gilchrist OK). The images are, in the majority, created by Dostoyevsky’s word pictures rather than through any physical or theatrical conventions.

The brazen and arrogant man lives in a boarding house run by a bullying landlady who beats her thin and timid daughter. He incriminates the girl falsely in the theft of his watch then seduces her. This act leads to her suicide callously witnessed by the man then blithely follows up with a jolly drink with his friends.

The man no longer differentiates between good and evil. He asks us, “Do you believe in God?” and suggests that he believes in a devil. Clearly this demon is within him.

In the second narrative, the Spanish Inquisitor in Seville interrogates the Saviour and threatens to kill him. The Inquisitor is as inherently evil as the man in the boarding house and the cold and calculated cruelty of both resonates in the contemporary world.

By Kate Herbert