WHEN post-punk fabulist Howard Devoto distilled Dostoyevsky's nihilistic novella, Notes From Underground, into the three verse and chorus melodrama of A Song From Under The Floorboards, released as a single by Devoto's band, Magazine, in 1980, it was arguably the ultimate piece of post-modern appropriation.
This hour-long devised dramatisation by the newly-formed and archly named Visiting Company attempts something similar in its treatment of the story of one man's self-conscious unleashing of his own despair. There are even some very Magazine-like moments in Andrew McGregor's contemporary score, during the six degrees of meta-narrative contained in Debbie Hannan's production.
On a TV monitor set among a table packed with empty bottles, a middle-aged Underground Man lays bare the glorification of his own isolation among idiots, dove-tailing his yarn with his younger self, made flesh and blood here by Samuel Keefe. First using a microphone to address the audience, then a mobile phone and a tablet to record every utterance as a social media confessional in excelsis, Keefe's litany becomes increasingly uncompromising in his willing alienation from others. Bringing the story up to date in such a hi-tech rendering suggests Dostoyevsky's anti-hero is recording some kind of posterity-seeking time capsule for the world to rake over after he's gone.
Even his angry sexual liaison with prostitute Liza, played by Millie Turner, is driven by hate. As they thrash about, drenchings of ink become smeared across them, as if the pages of the story-book that Underground Man had immortalised his narrative on were melting into him. It's a powerful image of self-negation in Visiting Company's promisingly bold debut.
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