Crime and Punishment Live at Open Window Theatre

Adapted for the stage by Chris Hannan, from the novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Directed by Joe Hendren

“Everybody wants to change the world. Nobody thinks to change himself.”

Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is crime thriller meets Karl Marx and Jesus Christ. Grounded in the realistic context of a St. Petersburg slum, the anti-hero Raskolnikov commits murder as a sort of experiment. “Have I the right to murder?” he wants to know.

One of the most extraordinary novels of all time gets inside the mind of a starving, destitute student who brutally kills an old woman and pawnbroker, embarking on a cat-and-mouse game with the examining magistrate. As his guilt and alienation from society intensifies, only Sonya, a prostitute and, like him, a social outcast, offers any hope of redemption.