My Dream.
What drew me to retell this story by Dostoevsky was a number of my own personal experiences which I saw reflected in that of the Ridiculous Man and his Dream.
I believe that the most powerful outcome of such experiences is an internal shift in perspective. If integrated in a healthy manner these shifts reshape our view of the world, allowing us to let go of the little fictions that cause us needless suffering and replace them with a deeper sense of connection to the people around us and the world that we live in.
- TOM LARKIN
As Terence McKenna once said,
“We have to recognize that the world is not something sculptured and finished, which we as percievers walk through like patrons in a museum; the world is something we make through the act of perception.”
Director’s vision
To inhabit Dostoevsky’s heightened prose with its many tones and rhythms – disruptive, confessional, rhetoric, poetic – its diatribes and long silences so characteristic of his compositions, and all the while to relive the dream’s myriad images and emotions in front of an audience is an act over a chasm and the result of many months of dedicated rehearsal.
Who is Dostoevsky’s Ridiculous Man? Is he a hero of the underground on his Dantesque journey through the tiered cosmos or is he just a loner roaming the city at night, an eccentric nihilist and megalomaniac? What will become of him after his flight to Paradise and back to earth? Will he discover his true vocation? Could it be that Dostoevsky drew on his own rite of passage in this extraordinary Portrait of the Poet as a Young Man?
Creative Team
Tom Larkin
Appeared in Life of Pi Wyndham’s West End, UK & international tour (Olivier Award Winner - Best Supporting Actor as Richard Parker). War Horse National Theatre UK & international tour. Bury the Dead Finborough, Demons SplitMoon Theatre, An Inspector Calls PW Productions UK tour, 55 Days Hampstead Theatre, Peter Pan 360 Entertainment US tour. Emperor Self Arcola. Short films include Leave It Be, After Frühstück, Kettled.
actor
Peter Stürm
Dostoevsky has been a thread throughout his career. As a young actor he performed in The Brothers Karamazov in Zurich and subsequently played The Grand Inquisitor at the Theatre of Lucerne and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man in Germany.
In 2017 he adapted and directed Demons at St Leonard’s Church, Shoreditch. Other productions include Brecht’s In The Jungle of Cities Arcola, and his own Killer of the Sun in The Rose and Desert Poet in The Cockpit. He is the artistic director of SplitMoon Theatre.
director
Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky
Have been pivotal in the way Dostoevsky is perceived in the West. Their translations of The Brother’s Karamazov and of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina were awarded the PEN Translation Prize in 1991 & 2002. They have translated works by Chekhov, Gogol, Bulgakov and Pasternak. They also collaborated with SplitMoon Theatre on Dostoevsky’s Demons.