Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1864 novella, Notes from Underground, was the author’s breakthrough work and very much ahead of its time. With its original literary architecture and cerebral leaps of focus, it is widely regarded as one of the first and most influential of existential stories. An enigmatic first part reveals a man who has withdrawn from the world – a retired minor civil servant and the Underground Man of the title – addressing an undefined audience of ‘gentlemen’ in a wide-ranging diatribe on societal ills, human nature, Western philosophy and the impossibility of building a utopian ‘Palace of Crystal’. The second part occurs 20 years earlier and is narrated by (supposedly) the same man – commonly known as the Aboveground Man – in which he explains a series of incidents that provoked his subsequent ‘burial’ from the world and his transition into the Underground man.

Notes from UndergroundBrenton Spiteri as Aboveground and Simon Lobelson as Underground

In Pierce Wilcox’s adaptation, the two halves are performed simultaneously, a choice that instead of leading to confusion in fact brilliantly illuminates the texts as told by each of the men. The resulting single tale is...