Zac Hamilton in Crime and Punishment – A Rock Musical at The Scoop, London. Picture: Sheila Burnett
Crime and Punishment – A Rock Musical at The Scoop, as part of London’s Free Open Air Season, continues until 25 September.
Star rating: one star ★ ✩ ✩ ✩ ✩
St Petersburg in Tzarist Russia is the setting for Dostoyevsky’s famous story of moral (maybe) murder followed by remorse and redemption. In this instance we get it peppered with samey music, mostly by Toyah Willcox (with Simon Darlow), every number illuminated by pop concert-style spinning coloured spotlights – for no apparent narrative reason.
And that’s just one of the show’s incongruities. Another puzzle is the set which is unaccountably based on a locomotive-style arrangement of wheels and cogs. And almost every scene is drenched in so much stage smoke that it might as well have been set in a very busy Victorian railway station.
The people near me in the audience drank and gossiped throughout the performance which was highly irritating, but their frequent hoots of laughter stemmed, I think, from derision and it was hard not to sympathise with that.
The very best thing in this show – which doesn’t have much to offset its shortcomings – is two sterling performances by director Phil Willmott. He is utterly pitiful as the whining, drunken failure Marmeladov and compelling as the shrewd, manipulative, icily spoken policeman, Porfiry Petrovich.
Otherwise most of the acting is hammy – partly because the adaptation is very wordy in the intervals between all those songs – and the singing very ordinary. Several people sing out of tune quite often and the singing isn’t always in time with the accompaniment. Angela Laverick, however, has moments of strength as Katerina, and Jasmeen James finds a certain dignity in Dunya.
The use of ensemble to act out scenes such as Marmeladov’s death feels self-consciously contrived and theatrical, and when everyone’s on together – usually during a song – the unmemorable choreography reminded me of a worthy but weak school play.
This production runs only 100 minutes but it doesn’t exactly speed past. It needs something much better than this to make you forget the rain and the cold concrete under your bottom. Free theatre for London is a very worthwhile idea (and this is the 14th year for the season), but give this show a miss.
Susan Elkin
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