Real theatre, so to speak, lay in my further struggles with Dostoyevsky.
After 'The Devils', Jerzy Stuhr, whom I valued highly
and who later took over Wojciech Pszoniak's role in 'The Devils' when Wojciech Pszoniak left Stary Teatr,
said to me, 'Listen, I'm the right age, do 'Crime and Punishment'.
I could play Porfiry Petrovich.'
This was the investigating officer.
I thought this was quite good because usually the role was given to older actors.
This is a fantastic part and older actors didn't let go of it.
But the idea of making them practically the same age,
this criminal who murders the old woman
and now hides his crime
while pretending that he murdered her for idealogical reasons,
and the investigating officer who is practically the same age. This was a good idea.
I listened to what Stuhr had to tell me and quickly considered it.
I had thought about 'Crime and Punishment' before because I knew one thing:
Dostoyevsky requires radical and brutal treatment.
Hamlet speaks the following words to his mother
in Act IV,
'I must be cruel to be kind.'
And this is what someone who wants to put on a play by Dostoyevsky must do, too.
He has to be cruel, he has to reject material.
I chose three interrogations.
Porfiry Petrovich is interrogating Raskolnikov suspecting him of the crime.
But we need to know whether he carried out the killing or not.
I came to the conclusion that the beginning is unnecessary in which he does the killing.
The opposite is the case: from this dialogue, we suspect what happened.
The three following scenes which I added in between, are scenes with Sonia to whom he admits that he is a murderer.
So we already know that he's a murderer
and now we'll watch him twist and turn and lie to Porfiry,
while Porfiry Petrovich will use his superb instinct and intelligence to nail him.
Thanks to this, I was able to do what was necessary,
namely, Dostoyevsky's heroes need to talk a lot.
One of the characters in 'The Devils' says this, too:
'They are fools, let us allow them to talk much.'
And that's what they do. I read a study by Bahdin on this subject.
Bahdin says that the consciousness of Dostoyevsky's heroes is created through dialogue.
What does this mean? It means that when they speak, they realise what they're aiming for
and if you don't allow them to speak a good deal
if, for example, someone wants to encompass the whole of 'Crime and Punishment',
then the dialogues need to be shortened.
Whereas I, having got rid of a large part of the story
was to limit myself to these interrogations and the scenes with Sonia,
could include the text of the dialogues in their entirety.
I knew already that Dostoyevsky's dialogues
worked brilliantly as spoken dialogues and and that nothing needed to be edited,
so I felt how well these characters were settled,
how genuine conflict was gradually building up, and how something from the real Dostoyevsky was appearing.
In addition, we wondered with Krystyna
whether we shouldn't incorporate a certain scene that wasn't in the play
but is in 'Crime and Punishment' namely, surveillance.
There is a person who spies and eavesdrops on others.
What if the play was performed in front of a small audience,
since we felt the actors would perform differently if the audience was small
and not like in 'The Devils' where they had to project themselves across a ramp to the distant audience.
I'd limit the audience to 100 at most 120 people or even fewer,
and we'd build an area
where the rooms would be separated by glass walls, doors, cubby holes.
In short, they were acting for themselves
while we're sitting, surprised that we can see this and not even entirely sure if we have the right to be seeing it.
They were so absorbed in themselves and in what was happening.
This worked very well on stage and I think it was one of two or three of the best decisions
I've taken about what I've done in theatre.