The Crocodile (NHB Modern Plays)
3.5/5
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About this ebook
Ivan is a struggling actor who hasn't yet achieved the recognition he feels he deserves. But all that is about to change when, one afternoon at the zoo with his friend Zack, he is swallowed whole by a crocodile.
Based on Dostoyevsky's short story, The Crocodile is a ferociously funny, eye-poppingly theatrical play about art, animals and what happens when you try to take on the system from within... a crocodile.
It premiered as part of the 2015 Manchester International Festival, in a co-production with The Invisible Dot.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) was a Russian short story writer, essayist, journalist, and one of the greatest novelists in all of world literature. His works are broadly thought to have anticipated Russian symbolism, existentialism, expressionism, and psychoanalysis. He also influenced later writers and philosophers including Anton Chekov, Hermann Hesse, Ernest Hemingway, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
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Reviews for The Crocodile (NHB Modern Plays)
3 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A humorous read bordering on (and into) the absurd. A man is eaten by a crocodile and lives in his stomach. He communicates with the outside world freely (via voice only). His life continues on, but one wonders how long he can maintain such an existence. It reminded me of something that Kafka would have written, but only more humorous. As I read, I wondered if The Crocodile influenced the writing of Metamorphosis by Kafka. A good book (very short, only 78 pages with notes and appendix), not life changing, but worth the read.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5It’s not that I didn’t like this short story from Dostoevsky, it’s just that it’s incomplete, and comes across as a fragment of an idea. The period in which Dostoevsky wrote this was one of great personal and economic strife, and he was finding an outlet for his increasing dislike of progressive European ideals. Clearly, the crocodile that swallows a man only to have him continue philosophizing within its belly is meant to be an absurd satire on these ideals, but it isn’t all that well developed. Dostoevsky himself said that it was the first part to a comic story that he never finished, and it shows. Frankly, it was more interesting to me to read his rebuttal to the claim that the man represented Nikolai Chernyshevsky, which he did years later in ‘Diary of a Writer’ and which was excerpted in the afterward. That would have been rather heartless indeed, despite their ideological differences, since Dostoevsky knew first-hand just how cruel and unfair imprisonment for political reasons was, but his account, which includes personal anecdotes with Chernyshevsky, seems believable. Regardless, this work is for Dostoevsky diehards only.