Word: lyubimov
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...stage, where they witness the scene of the crime: two effigies of corpses lie sprawled in rags. Above them is a bloodstained mirror in which each onlooker may see his own face. The notion at first seems precious. But at the end, during a redemptive candle-lighting ceremony, Lyubimov brings those battered bodies back to life in the person of actors, only to have their candles, and existences, snuffed out again by another character who echoes the murderer Raskolnikov's belief in arithmetic...
Like many adaptations of classic novels, Lyubimov's is less a retelling of the story than a musing on its themes, best understood by people who know its plot well. Raskolnikov (Randle Mell) harps on the quasi-Nietzschean idea that conquerors absolve themselves of sin by the very act of conquest. He repeatedly urges himself to be a Napoleon -- which, Lyubimov acknowledges, Soviet audiences often took to mean a Stalin. These philosophical monologues, however, are kept brief. Lyubimov relies heavily on ritual and brief blackout skits that verge on surreal slapstick; he creates a milieu more than he mounts...
...strip at the back wall that hints of someone peering in from behind. This Crime and Punishment is equally about the social injustices of the old Russia and the arrogance of the new Soviet state, and finds a continuity between them in their lack of Christian charity and love. (Lyubimov, a lifelong believer, wore rosary beads under his clothes in the Soviet Union. Now he carries them openly and touches them often...
...Lyubimov was inspired to stage his original Moscow version, he says, by reading the essays of schoolchildren, an extract from one of which provides the coda to the show: "So, Raskolnikov was right to murder the old woman. Too bad he got caught." In Lyubimov's view, the child was echoing the amoral views of a teacher and, in turn, the state. An attentive father who travels everywhere accompanied by his second wife Katya, a Hungarian, and son Piotr, 7, Lyubimov will next mount an adaptation of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita at the American Repertory Theater at Harvard...
Soviet Director Yuri Lyubimov makes a blazing U.S. debut with Crime and Punishment. -- Mary Tyler Moore shines in Sweet...