Andrezej Wadja's dramatization of Fiodor M. Dostojevski's novel focuses on the three main characters: The student, Raskolnikov, has slain an old moneylender. His motive has less to do with greed than with his ambition to perpetuate a perfect crime. Raskolnikov considers himself an intellectual supremo: he feels he is responding to a calling which empowers him to eliminate such inferior forms of life as that of the wretched usury- practicing woman. Wadja finds here the sprinkling of a proto- fascist ideology which he wants to expose and attack through the medium of theater. The interrogating judge, Porfirif Petrovitsch, is his prosecutor: Petrovitsch has no concrete evidences, but he intuitively feels the macabre in Raskolnikov. He pushes him to the edge until Raskolnikov breaks down and confesses. Only the streetwalker Sonja, through her meekness and faith in God, who brings humanity and consolation in this sombre surrounding. She succeeds in awakening Raskolnikov's guilt and in bringing him to remorse.
Andrzej Wadja, who has become one on the greatest luminaries of contemporary film through such works as "Ash and Diamond", "The Man of Steel", "Danton" and "ALoveAffair in Germany", always manages to find his way back into the theater where he started his career. Dostojevski occupies a special place for him in this regard. As early as 1971, Wadja has directed this author's "The Demons" in the dramatization by Albert Camus which he likewise tackles in his most recent film.
In Germany, his interprtation of "Guilt and Remorse" was already performed in Germany, albeit with a Polish troupe. Wadja was then connected with the Stary Theater of Crakau which guested in the Frankfurt Festival "Theater from Around the World". The Second German Television's (ZDF) Theater Programming Division, in Norbert Kückelmann's film about the festival entitled "The Time Searchers ", incorporated excerpts of this version of Wadja's work. In the present theatrical interpretation, we witness once again his introspection into the Raskolnikov material, this time with a German ensemble, with Jutta Lampe, Udo Sammel and Stephan Bissmeier, as it was performed in Berlin's The Schaubühne Theater.
What, in Dostojevski, could have aroused Wadja's interest so immensely? "Schuld und Sühne" comes only as one in a series of Dostojevski works which Wadja has already directed for the theater which include "The Idiot" and "The Soft Ones". A comparison with the Russian director Jurij Ljubinow did not give his work the title "Guiltand Remorse" but, instead, "Crime and punishment", with which it is more widely known in the english- speaking world, and unfolds herein a witches' cauldron of movement, emotion and expressionistic style.
In contrast, Wadja's point of view is frugal and stern. His interest lies in the theological issue- man's temptation to exalt himself as the master of others, the psyche of the criminal who claims for himself the privilege of exception, but which Wadja wantsto propagate against. Wadja threshes these arguments in the form of a psychological bout; he makes the characters and their philosophies growingly collide with iach other, pounce on each other. This allows us to track a cerebral drama on the abuse of freedom, on the misuse of autonomy. Wadja's dramatization is, in this sense. Rather, it is a piercing spiritual exploration meant to exorcise.