Novel Staging

Crime and Punishment in Washington, D.C.

THEATER

Martin Amis maddens the mountain ram in Norman Mailer.

JAMES WOLCOTT

Watching Yuri Lyubimov's Crime and Punishment is like seeing Orson Welles's Citizen Kane for the first time: light, sound, images, music are used with a breathtaking freedom that stirs the senses while reviving the medium. Lyubimov turns Dostoyevsky's novel into a dizzying nightmare. A bloodstained door, the central image, takes on an acrobatic life of its own, turning into a bed, a coffin, an entrance to hell. Strobe lighting assaults the retina. Balletically drilled crowds evoke 1860s St. Petersburg. But Lyubimov is a razzle-dazzle experimentalist with the instincts of a moralist; when he staged his frenzied adaptation in Moscow in 1979, it was in protest against the fashionable Soviet exoneration of the novel's murderer hero. Lyubimov condemns the Napoleonic killer, who puts himself above morality, with the message that "one can't call evil good." But the director paid the price for his political and artistic radicalism; in 1984, he lost his theater and his citizenship and is now a theatrical Flying Dutchman restaging the work across Europe. This month he brings it to Washington, D.C., and it will be fascinating to see how his Slav symbolism marries with American actors' Methodical realism. The result should raise a Kane. Arena Stage. Washington, D C. (112-2122)

MICHAEL BILLINGTON