A descent into The Idiot
“The ordinary accounts of this vortex had by no means prepared me for what I saw.” - A Descent into the Maelström by Edgar Allan Poe
Truthfully, I was not familiar with any accounts of …some trace of her, but I was still unprepared for this unusual, giddying play. It is inspired by Dostoevsky’s tome The Idiot; adapted by Katie Mitchell and company. I haven’t read the book, which I suppose shouldn’t be essential. But it is a big book, with big themes, so we only get the skeleton of the story.
This merest skein of a story is adapted into a play that is filmed and shown live on a screen above the actor’s heads. The actors are also camera operators, sound people, special effects people and more. They use four desk lamps, four video cameras, four spot lights, and six microphones to record the action and run about the stage. An actor might move from making rain sounds with a cloth to playing a lady fingering her prayer beads and then to reading a voice-over.
We can see how the images and sounds are cut together to make create the story: one person is filmed putting a soup spoon in his mouth, while another camera films a bowl with a hand spooning the soup out, and as this happens a third person makes chinking and slurping sounds. (This prince slurps his soup.) The scenes can be quite short, so there is a lot of movement on the stage as they prepare for the next scene. It can be difficult to know where the images and sounds are coming from. But it’s an interesting to try and spot where and how the film above our heads is being created.
Voices whirl around the stage: narrators, interior monologues, conversations, and biblical readings coming from various actors. Which character do these voices come from, from where in the narrative? The sounds are so complex that the computer arranging them all crashes and we all sit there while it reboots. So many fires are lit that Autumn remarks that it’s fire blanket-tastic.
Gradually a story emerges, revolving around a beautiful woman who seems to be sending everyone mad. Jamie Ballard plays Rogozhin who suffers from an amour fou, a hopeless passion that moves him like a puppet and turns his life upside down. Prince Myshkin sits on the other side of this bizarre love triangle, played by Ben Whishaw, a slightly wimpy, naive hero - the ‘idiot’ himself. Myshkin also loves ‘my lady’, but it’s a higher love, Christian pity. There are other characters too: a coughing consumptive, two women, one of whom reads the bible, but I couldn’t figure out what they were doing in the plot.
I was confused as to exactly what was meant to be happening, probably a bit like the characters who live a delirium, somewhere between dream and nightmare. It’s all very ‘Russian’, a galloping troika of passion crossing a wintry landscape of doomed garrets and metaphysical fevers. The spinning of the story and the busy activity on the stage, reflects the visions and tortures of the characters. I might not been able to work out the what was what, but the interior world Dostoyevsky’s characters is represented by some arresting images on the screen which spills out on to the stage and us.
Tags: ...some trace of her, Dostoyevsky, Katie Mitchell, National Theatre, The Idiot