It sounds like a Netflix drama or maybe an episode of Law & Order. A young man who believes himself above the law murders a pawnbroker with an axe, robs her flat and kills the only witness. Then he is racked with guilt as a policeman investigates the case.
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The Street Theatre is producing a modern, three-actor adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1866 novel Crime and Punishment. Converting a 500-page-plus book with many characters into a 90-minute play with three actors (Christopher Samuel Carroll, PJ Williams and Josephine Gazard) is quite an achievement. It will give audiences the chance to experience the story in much less time than it would take to read the book.
This 2003 adaptation by Marilyn Campbell-Lowe and Curt Columbus has received many awards and accolades. Its imminent arrival at The Street made me wonder: how many people have actually read Crime and Punishment? Or other Classic Works of Literature?
Mark Twain defined a classic as "something that everyone wants to have read and nobody wants to read".
He was onto something.
Some books in the generally acknowledged literary canon have daunting reputations. Russian novels are massive tomes with many, many characters; James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Ulysses are impenetrable and incomprehensible (if you want to dip your toe into Joyce, try the more accessible short stories or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). They seem more like projects, massive undertakings, than accessible, enjoyable reads: Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace has become shorthand for this kind of book. You could have them on your bookshelf to look erudite and cultured; chances are nobody will call your bluff because they haven't read them, either. In most cases, you can get by with shortcuts: reading the Wikipedia page, watching the play or movie, knowing a cultural reference or two, remembering what you read at school or university (you did read the set books, right?)
With Cervantes' Don Quixote and Melville's Moby-Dick you can listen to the cast album of Man of La Mancha (from which the song The Impossible Dream comes) and know where the expression "tilting at windmills" comes from with the former and the idea of chasing the white whale with the latter.
With Marcel Proust's seven-volume In Search of Lost Time (formerly translated as Remembrance of Things Past), all you need to know is that the taste of a madeleine instantly evoked the memory of the narrator's aunt feeding him a piece on one of his boyhood Sunday visits. The "Proust effect" is real: the smell of Play-Doh takes me back to being in hospital when I was young.
Not all classics are in Twain's category. Jane Austen's small oeuvre still seems to be going strong, although the number of screen adaptations might mean some people get their Austen fix that way (it's all about women seeking suitable husbands, right?). The sodden Colin Firth emerging from a lake in the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice still makes ladies swoon.
And Charles Dickens still has his fans, it would seem, at least for some works like Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol (the latter has the advantage of being short and, ultimately, sweet). Other people just watch the movies - the David Lean Great Expectations and Oliver Twist or the musical Oliver! or one of the many versions of Ebenezer Scrooge's Christmas redemption story.
Two of the Bronte sisters had one big hit each that were influential and are still read. Emily's Wuthering Heights had the strange, tortured love between Catherine and Heathcliff in a wildly intense story that's inspired movies, books and a Kate Bush song. Charlotte's Jane Eyre was one of the first, if not the first, story of a young woman and a mysterious older man with a deep dark secret (Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca owes it a debt). While we might argue about which of the two comes first in quality and popularity, Anne's Agnes Grey is definitely the third.
If we want to go way back there is, of course, the Bible. Whatever your religious convictions or lack thereof, there's no denying this book's central role in history and culture - painting, music, sculpture, on and on and on. Stories from the Bible are known to people who've never even looked at it, as well as many quotations and sayings (such as don't cast your pearls before swine).
Apart from school, many will not have read many, or any, of the plays of William Shakespeare, from whom many characters and quotations are familiar. But then plays are meant to be seen.
So forget about The Street's Crime and Punishment being an adaptation. Think of it as a work unto itself.
And maybe try the book, too.
- Crime and Punishment is on at The Street Theatre from June 21 (preview) to July 7. See: thestreet.org.au.