Idiots

I have a confession to make: I’ve never read The Idiot. In fact, unless 30-odd pages of Crime and Punishment counts, I’ve not read any of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s work. Not that that matters too much when watching Idiots, Caligula’s Alibi’s odd slant on Dostoevsky’s novel. As the company insists, this is not an adaptation.

What it is, instead, is a surreal intertwining of key moments from The Idiot with the fraught existence of an imagined, purgatory-residing Dostoevsky. Stubbornly avoiding judgement, the Russian author wallows in his unfinished business in a dingy tenement building, alongside the likes of Dickens and Tolstoy. That’s until an ominous bureaucrat turns up on his doorstep, brandishing paperwork and quizzing him on his life.

Not content with two narratives, Caligula’s Alibi frame all this with some self-aware silliness, playing with the expectations of the audience. This strand feels the least developed of the three, involving the audience with little apparent reason other than exposing our ignorance of Russian literature – at least at the performance I attend.

The company is at its best when at its most oddball. There’s a brilliantly bizarre party sequence, party hats and all, while the final scene enjoyably dials up the strangeness. Jonathan Hopwood’s live music is another highlight, undercutting moments of seriousness and amplifying the comedy. 

These fragments, however, struggle to hold together. It might not be an adaptation, but it’s sometimes hard to see what Caligula’s Alibi is aiming for in its place.