Drama that will move you

One advantage of site-specific theatre is that you're introduced to extraordinary spaces you never knew existed. With Dreamthinkspeak's interpretation of Dostoyevsky's Crime And Punishment, you discover a cavernous former abattoir, spread across two floors, behind an unassuming door in Islington.

For, removed from the ordinary world outside, it's a fitting place for a promenade installation which mostly succeeds in transporting the audience to a shadowy St Petersburg and the tortured mind of its protagonist Raskolnikov.

This is theatre you can drop into at any point, since the story happens all around you on an 80min loop. In one corner Raskolnikov feverishly plays through the forthcoming murder, pacing his bedroom. Down a bricked corridor, Marmaladov makes merry in a vodka bar while his daughter Sonia prostitutes herself on the street and his dying wife, Katarina, loses herself in girlhood memories.

You stumble by chance across the murder of the worthless moneylender, Alyona Ivanovna, taking place behind closed doors. Later her ghost will haunt the city's streets, thronged with black-clad inhabitants and, of course, the sweating, desperate Raskolnikov himself.

The drawback of this approach is that you constantly fear the real story is happening elsewhere. Dreamthinkspeak compensates for this by ensuring that nearly every nook and cranny holds a dream-like, dramatic tableau filled with spectres, secrets and narrative detail. All the while, a huge video projection of a travelling underground train provides a constant and subtle visual correlative for Raskolnikov's existential imprisonment.

Meanwhile, the joy of suddenly coming across, say, Raskolnikov being interviewed by Porfiry the detective, or ruminating on the philosophical consequences of his deed, make you feel you are involved in some sort of psychotheatrical treasure hunt. The production invariably lacks the finer intellectual points of the novel - but as a visual and sensual evocation of a nightmare, it will haunt you for days.

Underground