In Some Trace of Her at the National Theatre, Katie Mitchell produced a memorable 90-minute response to Dostoevsky’s partly autobiographical novel, The Idiot, about a holy fool afflicted with epilepsy, whose goodness means he is underestimated by those he encounters. Mitchell recognised the novel as an exercise in form as much as content – and so do Caligula’s Alibi, though they lack the financial and technical resources that Mitchell had at her disposal.
“That cost half the budget,” observes Jonnie Bayfield’s Dostoevsky balefully, pointing to the flashing sign that shouts “This is not an adaptation” in block capitals. Quite a lot of this 70-minute show seems to be performed in block capitals, too.
Just as Dan Rebellato made successful theatrical capital out of relocating the author of Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard to modern-day London in Chekhov in Hell, so Caligula’s Alibi offer us a Dostoevsky in a contemporary purgatory, who is being harried by a moustache-twirling bureaucrat (an engaging Adam Colborne) investigating the writer for disability fraud. It’s a good device that makes us see the parallels between corrupt and abusive mid-19th-century Russia and our own times, but the show skitters all over the place without committing itself to any particular line of inquiry, so the overall impression is of some good ideas that are not yet fully explored intellectually or aesthetically.
There’s fun to be had along the way, some of it quite strident. But while the piece begins in a jokey fashion that leads you to think it is a comedy, it clearly yearns to be something more meaningful without finding its own distinctive voice or what it wants to say. The real irony is that although it eschews adaptation, the most satisfying parts of the evening are those when it is closest to that.
- At Soho theatre, London, until 2 April. Box office: 020-7478 0100.
