‘Crim i càstig’, test passed in the Lliure


There are bets that win applause just for the challenge of undertaking them. This is the case of ‘Crim i càstig’, the adaptation by Pau Carrió at the Teatre Lliure of the monumental novel by Fiódor Dostoyevski. Carrió comes out of the deadly triple which means facing the theatrical translation of a novel of almost 700 pages. And it does not make it easy for the viewer with a montage that exceeds three and a half hours, not counting a 20-minute break. A work of those calls to summon either to a very theatrical public or to the most enthusiastic followers of the great Russian narrator. The director puts himself in the hands of his fetish actor, Pol López, for this enormous scenic journey.

The piece presents a good distillation of the novel with a table of scenes as a Summary of the argument: the psychological portrait of the character, the decadent environment of the decades before the Russian revolution, a heated debate of ideas and a police plot. It is the one that arises as a result of the crime of Raskólnikov, an ex-student who wanders unconsciously through his life and through the streets of Moscow. More schematic and questionable is the drawing of main characters in the novel, such as the young prostitute Sonia.

The Fabià Puigserver Room, arranged upside down

The 10 performers of a solid cast occupy a larger space than usual in a Fabià Puigserver room arranged upside down. The actors move (obviously without mounted seats) where the public usually sits and the spectators are located in the usual area of ​​the stage. the game works sheltered by the magnificent wooden arcades of the room, although there is also the feeling that the amplitude of the space is not always justified.

Carrió moves between two territories, that of the more conventional theater and that of a more ‘modern’ invoice and greater symbolic load. The electronic music of Arnau Vallvé, punctured live by Joan Solé, explodes at that moment, like the big plastic bubble that falls on the stage and that becomes a huge igloo. He appears in those moments of delirium in which Rodia is trapped by the inner ghosts that awaken in him after having murdered the old moneylender, and, by rebound, her sister. Or at least that can be understood from a scenographic proposal as cumbersome as something free.

After a flatter and more irregular first part, with entrances and exits that stop the rhythm, the piece grows when it moves on that more conventional terrain, especially in the hand in hand between the protagonist and the curator, police station for Carrió, around the police investigations for the crime. These are moments of high intellectual voltage with echoes of Nietzsche that emerge when the protagonist appeals to the division of society between ordinary and extraordinary people or to the legitimacy of the use of violence.

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In those scenes, an extraordinary Míriam Iscla, without hesitation and always in her place, raises Carrió’s proposal to the highest point, well supported by López, a headliner subjected to a strenuous marathon. The actor never leaves the scene and empties himself into an overwhelming job, based on his well-known interpretive catalog. He stands out more in the moments of pause than in those of delirium, when he lets himself be carried away by a somewhat excessive register. Small blemish that does not blur a ‘tour de force’ from which he comes out with his head held high, just like his accomplice in risky theatrical adventures.

‘Crime and punishment’

Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Direction and adaptation: Pau Carrio

Interpreters: Pol López, Míriam Iscla, Albert Prat, Roser Batalla, Oriol Guinart, Carlota Olcina, Francesca Piñón, Òscar Rabadán, María Rodríguez, Marc Rodríguez


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