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Based on the cult 1970's movie starring Vincent Price, Improbable's new gore-spattered black comedy (created in collaboration with the National) is all about a bunch of theatre reviewers being bumped off by an old-school Shakespearean ham named Lionheart. This ought to be critic-proof. But where that - like so many promenade installations - depended on atmosphere rather than meaning, this new show is much more satisfyingly cerebral. At one point, when the safety curtain lifts, the whole auditorium feels like the interior of Raskolnikov's skull It's brilliant stuff. The good news is: this production is being recreated in a warehouse in Clerkenwell, London The bad news is: not till October.. Like Raskolnikov's haunted imagination, you return to it again and again, eternally.The evening has its share of hammy theatrical devices - laughing ghosts that appear unexpectedly at windows and suchlike. But even these are executed with such exquisite ingenuity you would need a hard-boiled heart not to succumb.Dreamthinkspeak is adept at creating startling images, as they proved with their production Don't Look Now, (Stanmer Park/ Somerset House).
In the lower depths of the orchestra pit, you chance upon a consumptive woman railing at a drunk in Russian. Peeping through a dark spyhole in the wings, you glimpse Raskolnikov, stoking his axe.Trapped in the theatre with these figments, it becomes ambiguous as to whether they are chasing you, or you are chasing them: the installation perfectly recreates the paranoiac atmosphere of the novel. Moreover, all the routes round the theatre lead to different views of the crime: you can see the murder projected onto a wall on film; you can see the murder through a crack in a dressing room door; you can even see the murder taking place at the window of a next door house a few rooftops away. Or more accurately, they tore Crime and Punishment into little bits and let you, the wandering audience, piece it all together. Only Dreamthinkspeak, a company that excels at eerie promenade performances, could have done it.
For four nights last week, they re-enacted Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment backstage at the Theatre Royal, Brighton. Peering into a cramped dressing room, you see the ghost of murdered Alyona Ivanovna counting her jewels and plate. There wasn't much impact, but it's getting more and more dangerous the more we do the piece. Sometimes when the curtain comes down we all three look at each other as if to say, well we made it, but it was close.. And Sylvie's always up for it, that's the amazing thing.We did smack her chin on the floor in rehearsal the other day. But at the same time we're always upping the stakes, adding that bit of extra daring, throwing her higher, catching her later, pushing the risk.
