“These days” says the man on the empty stage, “people are precious to me, even when they insult me. I have woken up”. His stark features do not smile as he says it, because he has an urgent stoey to tell. Greg Hicks, restlessly prowling with a suitcase, making himself shabby, explains how he made a career, made friends, lost both as it dawned on him that ‘human existence is an unhappy accident in a malign universe”, and that there is no reason for anything. He evokes a Dalston pub where people are drunk, quarrel, laugh at him and one another; the streets he crosses uncaring amid lights and horns (brief skilful projections, flashes, sounds off). He tells of meeting a desperate child asking for help, and ignoring her because nothing matters. He evokes the bedsit where around him other desperate people wait hopelessly for ambulances, and prepares to shoot himself in the head. Pausing, horrifyingly, to take the gun from his mouth and a memory of lovelier things, the plaintive Irish “She moved through the fair”. And he falls asleep, and dreams.
This theatre has, in its launching months, developed a deliberate feel for the Eastern European soul: a remarkable Russian/Ukrainian story of the Polish WW2 ghetto in The White Factory, another tale of a wartime Polish forest in The Most Precious of Gifts; in a few weeks comes Gogol’s Government Inspector. And now, hauntingly extraordinary, this short story by Fyodor Dostoyefsky. It’s adapted , and moved from old Petersburg to modern East London by Laurence Boswell. He also directs it, grippingly, with Loren Elstein’s starkly arresting design and absolutely the best-chosen solo actor..
For Greg Hicks is a phenomenon, an RSC and national theatre veteran but exotically un-English in expression : he has a kind of menacing grace, not quite balletic (closer indeed to the Brazilian fight-dance of capoeira, in which he is adept) . To every role he has brought that unsettling difference, to good effect whether as Lear or the terrifying newspaper editor in Clarion . Here, he becomes the wandering witness narrator of the deepest truth. HIs dream takes him to a paradise, an island where simple people live without fear , lust or deceit. It is evoked with subtle lights and projections, all still before the curtain which has not lifted. His gravity, barely smiling even in wonder but intense, expressive in every limb, holds it clear of romantic absurdity though it is the oldest trope of religious philosophers: the sinless Eden. But the second oldest is of course corruption – the serpent, Pandora’s Box opened.
Awakening – the whole stage behind him suddenly broader, revelling in his happiness at this discovery that human beings are born pure and good – he pauses, the gun forgotten, but has painfully to tell the rest of the dream: that it was he who spoilt the Paradise. Lightly flirting, he taught them to deceive and enjoy deceiving. From that flowered lust, then jealousy, cruelty, fear, the forming of groups, suspicion, blame, shame, denunciation , patriotism, war. Remembering, he becomes a tyrant rallying all these evils with glee (very Trump, Stalin, Putin). And startlingly concludes, as Dostoyevsky did, not that mankind is evil but that it doesn’t need to be. So his task is to say so..
Hicks holds us for 75 minutes; every light-change or brief projection judged to the second. It’s hard sometimes to work out what a “five-star” review is for , but sometimes all it means is that here is a thing of great simplicity, portrayed with perfect judgement to become subtle and unforgettable.
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