For more than a decade now, Phil
Willmott has been directing free summer shows in the outdoor Scoop
amphitheatre by London’s City Hall, concentrating on classics of world
literature retold breezily for non-culture-heads passing by on the
riverbank near Tower Bridge. This year his choice is Dostoevsky’s
Crime And Punishment, which is
laudable. He has decided to stage it as a rock musical, which is
audacious. The songs are by flame-haired 1980s new wave gadfly Toyah
Willcox, which shows breathtaking nerve. And with the discovery that
it’s a
jukebox Toyah
Dostoevsky musical, all diplomatic vocabulary flies out of the window
and the kindest term I can find is “ludicrous”.
It’s not entirely a scissors-and-paste compilation, but no more than
two of the dozen-plus songs are new compositions by Willcox and her
songwriting partner Simon Darlow. A clutch of the remaining numbers are
drawn from her 2008 album
In The
Court Of The Crimson Queen (Willcox's husband being Robert Fripp
of King Crimson), but as many hail from her early ’80s heyday. Some
lyrics have been retooled, but even so... When Willmott, as detective
Porfiry Petrovich, opines that the murder of an elderly and predatory
pawnbroker is a mystery, yes, it’s a mystery, and he’s still searching
for a clue, those of us of an age to remember the original version
dissolve in titters. In general the numbers with their pre-recorded,
quaintly synth-heavy arrangements are as conspicuously bolted-on as
Boris Karloff’s head in
Frankenstein.
Willmott’s intent is not to dwell on the bleak social fabric depicted
by Dostoevsky, but to focus instead on the former student Raskolnikov,
who commits the murder in an enactment of his proto-Nietzschean
philosophy. Instead of a charismatic figure cutting a swath through
19th-century St Petersburg, however, Alec Porter’s Raskolnikov is more
a pretty young man who gets caught up in his own self-mythologizing. He
wants to be free, in the words of another of Toyah’s greatest hits; in
the end, though, not only does he fail, but for 100 minutes we are the
ones who end up paying a grievous price for his attempt.
Written for the Financial
Times.