The Idiot

by Simon Gray

The Idiot is a dramatization of Fyodor Dostoievsky’s original novel. In creating this stage play, Simon Gray chose some of the most vivid and contrasting episodes recounting the strange involvement between Prince Myshkin, the good natured ‘Idiot’, the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna and her desperate lover and husband, Rogozhin. The ambiguity of these episodes and the paradoxical atmosphere of Dostoievsky’s novel – hovering between sombre tragedy and grotesque farce – is heightened by the use of a strange, sinister commentator, the character of Ferdyschenko.

112 pages, Hardcover

First published December 31, 1971

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Simon James Holliday Gray, CBE (21 October 1936 – 7 August 2008) was an English playwright and memoirist who also had a career as a university lecturer in English literature at Queen Mary, University of London, for 20 years. While teaching at Queen Mary, Gray began his writing career as a novelist in 1963 and, during the next 45 years, in addition to 5 published novels, wrote 40 original stage plays, screenplays, and screen adaptations of his own and others' works for stage, film, and television and became well known for the self-deprecating wit characteristic of several volumes of memoirs or diaries

Reviews

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

Gray's Prince Myshkin is a bit of a dry run for his Simon Hench in Otherwise Engaged or St John Quartermaine in Quartermaine's Terms; an otherworldly presence who drives those around him insane. Whilst it's an intriguing, albeit not successfully achieved, early Gray - it's not much of a Dostoevsky adaptation. Gray can't decide whether to turn it into a bit of a Chekhov or a big epic like Shaffer's The Royal Hunt of the Sun; Gray half-heartedly has Ferdýshchenko narrate things, but doesn't develop the idea. The excitement and tension of the novel is missing, although there are moments when the play comes alive. Unlikely to warrant a revival (unless for radio, perhaps) but interesting as a cue as to how not to adapt a large novel, and why Gray had to considerably narrow his canvas to say the things he wanted to say about human psychology.