Theatre review: Cry from underground

Published on Wednesday 19 August 2009 18:52

CRY FROM UNDERGROUND

NEW TOWN THEATRE (VENUE 7)

ADAPTED from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground, Thomas Manderlay's play transplants the action from 19th-century St Petersburg to an unnamed, contemporary western city. Informed by the book's overarching existential anguish, the plot nevertheless focuses on the latter part of the section 'A Propos of the Wet Snow', with Manderlay aptly importing his prostitute from Russia. Lisa's plight is as relevant as ever as she relates a thoroughly modern tale of human trafficking and slavery.

Appearing as the Underground Man himself, or Tolstoy as he's known in this version, Manderlay virtually spits when he denounces his former schoolmates as lawyers, bankers and parasites, his meagre existence at the margins of society unsettlingly current, with his servant in the novella now his landlord.

The first act is tough going as he paces his hovel, seething with some of the most misanthropic sentiments in the whole of literature, but Manderlay retains your attention with a charismatic distemper. Moreover, his encounter with Lisa (a wholly believable Amie Burns Walker) is beautifully handled, these two disparate people yet kindred spirits alternately drawn to, and repelled by, each other, with Dostoyevsky's depressing ending forsaken in favour of something more open-ended.

JAY RICHARDSON

Until 23 August. Today 1pm.