Crime and Punishment review – gripping portrait of Dostoevsky’s murderous antihero

Cast, DoncasterLaurie Sansom’s bold decision to stage the literary classic with a cast of three pays off in parts thanks to compelling performances and an atmosphere of shadowy dread You might say it were a bold move to stage Dostoevsky’s landmark novel with a cast of three. That is not only because Northern Broadsides does not usually stage small-scale adaptations: this studio tour is a first. More to the point, it is that a 750-page literary classic hardly suggests such economy of means. You could make the case, however, that Laurie Sansom’s reworking should have been bolder still. How might it have been if the director had gone the whole hog and slimmed it down to a single actor? Counterintuitive or not, the best sequences in this production are when Connor Curren is alone on stage as Raskolnikov, the troubling antihero who commits a double murder for no better reason than a thought experiment. Whether showing sociopathic indifference or fevered regret, Curren is compelling when he gets the chance to let us into his thinking. Haunted and dishevelled, he is a delusional philosopher, driven by extremes of poverty to turn abstract thought into brutal action. Dostoevsky’s in