FringeReview UK 2024
Dream of a Ridiculous Man
Marylebone Theatre
Genre: Adaptation, Classical and Shakespeare, Contemporary, European Theatre, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Short Plays, Solo Play, Theatre, Translation
Venue: Marylebone Theatre
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
A man walks on with a battered suitcase. “Mad. Foolish. Ridiculous. I’ve been called many things.” Laurence Boswell adapts and directs Dostoevsky’s Dream of a Ridiculous Man. Performed by Greg Hicks it runs for 65 minutes at the new (2022) Marylebone Theatre till April 13th. It’s a gem.
A definitive telling of that rarest thing, an uplifting Dostoevsky tale. It’s unlikely to be rendered better than this. Both this production, version and above all Hicks’ rendering is not only a gem. It’s realised in this new gem of a 200-seat theatre off Baker Street, wood-panelled and beautifully finished. The Marylebone – clearly a producing theatre – is also dedicated in part to Russian works. Gogol’s The Government Inspector is up in May and June. But see this first.
Adapted and Directed by Laurence Boswell, Set and Costume Designer Loren Elstein, Lighting Designer Ben Ormerod, Sound Design and Movement Director Gary Sefton, Composer Harrison White, Associate Lighting Designer Bethany Gupwell
Stage Manager Jo Alexander, DSM Charlotte Padgham,
Till April 13th
Review
A man walks on with a battered suitcase. “Mad. Foolish. Ridiculous. I’ve been called many things.” Laurence Boswell adapts and directs Dostoevsky’s Dream of a Ridiculous Man. Performed by Greg Hicks it runs for 65 minutes at the new (2022) Marylebone Theatre till April 13th. It’s a gem.
Hicks radiates a grizzled shabbiness: a man whose deliberate physical gawkiness reaches a state of sublimity as he gyrates and hollows out his body to the slings and arrows of Dostoevsky’s fortune, is quite mesmeric. His murmurous growl subdues listening to a rapt stillness.
Dostoevsky’s 20-page short story of 1877 has been subtly updated by Boswell. In a sense there was no need, since the dream itself, taking up 40 minutes, is perennial, and the displaced hero touches no specific cultural base. Seeing suddenly nothing exist outside him but randomness, he slacks at his Dalston high street bookshop job till he’s sacked. I mean, how many bookshops are there left, anywhere outside Charing Cross Road?
However, Boswell’s stated in the programme notes he wants his update to send us back to the original, realising its relevance. He and Hicks certainly accomplish that. What we have is updated references to east London suburbs and pubs, gauzy traffic lights in Ben Ormerod’s lighting design – Loren Elstein’s set is a bare stage with the screen projecting greyness of a bare palm tree and cerulean sky later. It allows Boswell to update the text to evocative lines like “The fluorescence of the streetlights made the night seem bleaker.”
A single use of a mobile phone allows Hicks to intone “Then my girlfriend dumped me. To be fair I’d become a pretty useless partner.” Elsewhere he’s sloshed by cars aka horse-drawn carriages. Perhaps the sheer squalor of Dostoevsky’s original might have been more compelling, were it not for Boswell feeling the redemptive nature of the story might be blunted were it still set in 1877’s St Petersburg.
Gary Sefton, both sound and movement director allows stillness to speak and minimal movement to tell. Just occasionally though the city sounds almost drown out Hicks’ voice; these could do with adjusting.
The eponymous Ridiculous Man contemplates suicide, possess a gun (easier in 1877’s st Petersburg than here), telling off his thin store of possessions before sleep. It’s then that the singular nature of Dostoevsky’s vision kicks in. Taken by an angel – several have called this Dostoevsky’s Christmas Carol – to a parallel Earth through space, he lands on an island not unlike the one Gaugin thought he’d encountered in the Polynesian islands in the 1890s. The parallels are telling: the West corrupts, and absolute West corrupts absolutely.
The paradisal world of pure harmony and companionship, an Edenic idyll a little more robust than H.G. Wells’ Eloi (in The Time Traveller) but more innocent of any Morlocks. That is till the wondrous man himself arrives. Can he prevent transmitting his own corruptive powers?
What Hicks has projected from the start is the epiphany of last November 3rd, a date which has turned the Ridiculous Man into a beatific if shrewder Prince Mishkin, admixed with Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner: the same compulsion to tell his vision. And, for the first time, its coda.
There’s glancing details too. How meeting one fellow ex-student he found he wasn’t regarded as ridiculous at all, but curiously aloof, a poet, a visionary. Dostoevsky’s irony is that finally, the man has become just that, awoken by falling asleep.
This is a definitive telling of that rarest thing, an uplifting Dostoevsky tale. It’s unlikely to be rendered better than this. Both this production, version and above all Hicks’ rendering is not only a gem. It’s realised in this new gem of a 200-seat theatre off Baker Street, wood-panelled and beautifully finished. The Marylebone – clearly a producing theatre – is also dedicated in part to Russian works. Gogol’s The Government Inspector is up in May and June. But see this first.
