Theater: Soviet Exile's Blazing Debut

Four years ago Soviet Director Yuri Lyubimov opened an adaptation of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment in London. Authorities in Moscow paid less attention to the rave reviews than to a London Times interview in which Lyubimov castigated Soviet censors for persistent interference with his work back home. Of 40 shows he had mounted, seven had been banned and many others had been rewritten or restaged. Said Lyubimov: "I am 65 years old, and I simply don't have the time to wait until these government officials finally arrive at an understanding of a culture that will be worthy of my native land."

Soon after, Lyubimov was warned that, like Dostoyevsky's antihero Raskolnikov, he was guilty of a "crime" and "punishment" would follow. Sure enough, he was stripped of his job at the Taganka Theater, which he had run for two decades, then his Communist Party membership, his Moscow apartment and finally, in absentia, his citizenship. After years of agitating for permission to work in the West, Lyubimov had cruelly been granted his wish. Since then he has staged plays and operas throughout Europe and in Israel, ranging from a Rigoletto in Florence, in which the heroine sang an aria while wafting through the air on a swing, to an expressionistic version of Pushkin's Little Tragedies in both Stockholm and Bologna. But his career, however thriving, involves painful artistic detachment, akin to a nuclear scientist's working through a glove box.

Last week Lyubimov, 69, made his U.S. debut at Washington's Arena Stage with ! a revised Crime and Punishment in English, a language he does not read or speak. To make the stage action conform to the vision in his head -- the standard by which Lyubimov, an auteurist and something of an autocrat, judges success -- he discussed the aims of the piece in Russian with Michael Henry Heim, an associate professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of California, Los Angeles, who wrote the English dialogue. Lyubimov then guided the actors through Interpreter Alexander Gelman, who is trained as a director. The process unnerved some of Arena's troupe, but the result confirms Lyubimov's reputation as one of the world's great directors. Crime and Punishment is a startling visual essay, awhirl with energy, ablaze with ideas, at once a devout invocation of Christian hope and a fervid warning against the moral "arithmetic" by which statesmen, as much as felons, balance evil deeds against happy consequences.

The show begins before the actors appear: all spectators are directed into the theater past the lip of the stage, where they witness the scene of the crime: two effigies of corpses lie sprawled in rags. Above them is a bloodstained mirror in which each onlooker may see his own face. The notion at first seems precious. But at the end, during a redemptive candle-lighting ceremony, Lyubimov brings those battered bodies back to life in the person of actors, only to have their candles, and existences, snuffed out again by another character who echoes the murderer Raskolnikov's belief in arithmetic.