Last year Kim Brandstrup achieved a masterly act of distillation in reducing Dostoevsky's The Idiot to his own fiercely concentrated love triangle, Elegy. His latest work, Brothers, expands the core of that piece into a longer, more open-textured narrative that features other stories and characters from Dostoevsky. The idea was to place his existing three protagonists in a larger fictional world, and deal with a more universal drama of men battling against failure and loss.
As with Elegy, the most striking feature of Brothers (made in collaboration with design team Craig Givens and Tina MacHugh, and composer Jonathan Stone) is its Russian atmosphere. Whether a scene is set in a prison dormitory, a cafe or a shabby domestic interior, the stage remains a place of chronic melancholy and violently acute emotion. Its drab colours are shuttered with dark shadows and cold light, and as the rain patters through Stone's mournfully melodic score, time appears to loop and stall.
Brandstrup's peasant-attired dancers all possess a peculiarly live and obdurate dramatic energy. They are a sharply varied group, whose faces and bodies suggest a freight of past history. Alongside the characters from Elegy (Nastasya Filippovna and the two men, Rogozhin and Myshkin, to whom she is erotically and spiritually bound), the cast features the sadistic father and his two sons from The Brothers Karamazov and a group of prisoners from The House of the Dead, all haunted by mothers, lovers, or some image of thwarted happiness. Brandstrup deftly shuttles between each narrative, weaving together their points of conflict, crisis and loss.
Moment by moment it is powerfully done. Brandstrup has a special gift for clarifying the essentials of any scene without resorting to cliche. The intensity with which the father taunts his son with the passive dream body of the woman they both love is vile and eerie. The climactic men's duet from Elegy is a breathtaking showdown between brute, muddled energy and saintly quietude. But as the work evolves, a failure of theatrical organisation is exposed: Brandstrup fails to make dynamic connections and fully exploit the echoes and coincidences that arise. His material eddies around its themes without ever clinching them. Dostoevsky's inspiration was evidently crucial to the making of Brothers. But the work might have made better choreographic sense if Brandstrup had junked the novelist's story lines and made up one of his own.
· At Richmond Theatre, Surrey (020-8940 0088), April 15, then touring to Blackpool, Birmingham and Truro.
