Staging a High Fantasy Masterpiece Time Forgot
How an overlooked novel from 1926, Nietzschean philosophy, and a grant award launched my most ambitious adventure yet
The moment a project transforms from “I hope one day I can make this happen” to “this is definitely happening” is both exhilarating and daunting. As I wrote in my last post, I received a grant right before the holidays to develop and produce my fourth theatricalization of a novel. I’m thrilled to begin the work, but also a tiny bit apprehensive since this will be my most ambitious project to date.
I’m meeting with artistic collaborators at the end of the month for a creative brainstorming session and a first attempt at tackling the logistics involved in a project with a scope and scale as vast as this one is sure to be. If you want to see how it all unfolds, I’ll follow up with essays about how the project evolves here, so be sure to subscribe for free below.
Although I don’t have confirmed dates and times for performances yet, I’m excited to announce my next production will be an adaptation of Hope Mirrlees’s 1926 high fantasy novel Lud-in-the-Mist.
Since I’m at a pivotal moment in the early life of this project—I haven’t yet worked with any collaborators in a rehearsal room—I thought I’d use this essay to answer a question I’m often asked: why did you choose to adapt this novel for the stage and why are you adapting it now?
Choosing source material is not a decision I take lightly. Any book I adapt will be one I have to live with for a long time—moving a novel from page to stage takes anywhere from two to ten years. For that reason, it’s important to choose material that sustains my interest long term. Looking back on my previous projects, I’ve identified key criteria I used to choose source material that kept me artistically engaged from inspiration to opening night and beyond.
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Artistic Evolution
When considering source material to adapt into a play, I always ask, “does this literary work contain opportunities to artistically challenge myself?” I’m not intending to discard everything I’ve done before. Instead, I look for literature that will force me to build on the foundation I’ve cultivated and expand my work into uncharted waters. The growth potential I identified in Lud-in-the-Mist largely emanated from its genre.
Genre fiction works like a prism—bending reality through an otherworldly lens that makes the uncomfortable impossible to ignore. My last three projects have all been rooted in genre:
Through Edith Wharton’s gothic tales in Unearthly Visitants (2021), I explored the weight of past transgressions that haunt the present;
Through E.M. Forster’s science-fiction novella The Machine Stops (2023), I exposed the inherent dangers of over-reliance on technology and separation from the natural world;
Through Yevgeny Zamyatin’s banned dystopian novel We (2024), I revealed the soul-crushing impact of authoritarianism spread by manipulated media and citizen compliance.
Both The Machine Stops and We were set in imagined futures, so I was eager to engage with a genre offering a fresh milieu. As a work of high fantasy, Lud-in-the-Mist opened up a vast new landscape I couldn’t wait to unleash on stage.
Before I began writing grant proposals for the project, I was unaware of the distinction between fantasy and high fantasy. I’ve since learned the difference is best articulated like this:
Fantasy is an umbrella term for stories containing supernatural or magical elements;
High fantasy describes stories set in a fully realized secondary world with its own detailed logic, geography, and history, typically driven by epic, world-shaping conflict.
The chance to play in the world of high fantasy—overflowing with royalty, castles and magical creatures—delighted me, and the genre presents an intriguing artistic challenge since high fantasy typically finds a home on screen rather than on stage. Film can literally show expansive kingdoms and fire-breathing dragons through visual effects. Theater cannot. But I see this limitation as an opportunity: how can I use the language of the stage—lights, costumes, movement, music, puppetry, video projection—to conjure high fantasy through theatrical suggestion rather than literal representation, inviting the audience to complete the magic through their own imagination?
Worthy of an Encore
Once I decided I wanted to work in this genre, my next step was identifying an under-acknowledged literary work. The overarching theme of the plays I’ve self-produced has been adapting works unfamiliar to a general audience. Many people knew Wharton from The Age of Innocence or Ethan Frome, but most did not know she wrote ghost stories. Forster’s A Room with a View and Howards End were adapted into award-winning films, but few know he wrote a singular—and spectacular—work of science fiction. Not only was Zamyatin’s We banned, it has been eclipsed by Orwell’s re-interpretation of the novel through 1984. So I wasn’t looking for any high fantasy novel, I was looking for a worthy work that time had cast aside.
When I read a quote describing Lud-in-the-Mist as “the single most beautiful and unjustifiably forgotten novel of the twentieth century” I thought I had a possible winner. Sometimes older novels feel musty, but Mirrlees’s prose had a surprising freshness. Its page-turning plot reminded me of the joy I experienced the first time I read J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Lud-in-the-Mist’s characters were quirky and vivid, its narrative gripping, and the thematic content potent. When I finished the novel I thought, “how is it possible this book has been overlooked?”
Additionally, when people think about the most influential authors in the high fantasy genre, the names that come to mind are most frequently J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Ursula K. Le Guin, and George R.R. Martin. However, Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist precedes Tolkien’s The Hobbit by a decade. She was a pioneer in the genre because she recognized its potential as a lens through which a reader could view the eternal conflicts at the heart of being human.
Theoretical and Philosophical Engine
As readers of high fantasy know, some novels are simply entertaining tales. There’s nothing wrong with that, and I have deep appreciation for any author who can craft a great yarn. However, Lud-in-the-Mist is more than an epic tale in a far-off land, it’s driven by theory and philosophy.
Mirrlees was a student, collaborator and close friend of classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison. As one of the first female academics in British history, Harrison developed a theory about ancient Greek art in groundbreaking works such as Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903) and Ancient Art and Ritual (1913). In her work, Harrison posited that academics had misunderstood the relationship between art and ritual, arguing Greek art was not created then ritualized; instead, ritual came first and the art—for example, the art on ancient vases—captured the ritual itself. Only when the preceding rituals were fully considered could the art inspired by them be understood. Harrison’s work—looking at art not in isolation, but in the context of the culture it was created in—helped lay the groundwork for the field of performance studies and transformed the way academics approach the study of art to this day.
Lud-in-the-Mist is not only concerned with Harrison’s scholarship—it also tests philosophical ideas first presented by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy (1872). In his first published work of philosophy, Nietzsche divides art into two forms:
Apollonian art—representing order, individuation, beauty, illusion and dreams (observed in the plastic arts like sculpture and epic poetry);
Dionysian art—representing primal unity, ecstasy, intoxication, and dissolution of boundaries (observed in music and choral frenzy).
Nietzsche asserts the early Greek tragedy of Aeschylus achieved greatness through the synthesis of these two forms before it was marred by Socratic rationalism, tipping later drama by Sophocles and Euripides into Apollonian excess.
The interplay between Harrison and Nietzsche in Mirrlees’s novel becomes vibrantly clear from a synopsis of the book:
The story is set in the prosperous merchant city of Lud-in-the-Mist, capital of the Free State of Dorimare, situated at the confluence of two rivers—the Dapple (flowing from the forbidden land of Faerie) and the Dawl. Centuries earlier, the city’s burghers overthrew their erratic, Faerie-influenced duke in a bloody revolution, banishing all traces of myth and mysticism from the previous culture and replacing it with a rigid devotion to law, commerce, and rational order.
Yet in the rural outskirts of Dorimare, belief in Faerie lingers, and fairy fruit—intoxicating, hallucinogenic, and tied to ecstasy and the unknown—smuggled down the Dapple River begins to infiltrate the city.
When the children of Lud’s elite consume the fruit, they fall under its spell: entering trances and vanishing across the Debatable Hills toward Faerie, drawn by its enchanting allure. The city’s frantic attempts to suppress the breach expose the fragility of their rational facade, revealing both the vital enchantment and the profound threat of the past they cast aside.
This conflict forces Lud’s elite to confront impulses they’ve long suppressed—ritualistic origins buried beneath civilized artifice, and the ecstatic forces that rational order cannot fully contain—revealing the need to reconcile the mundane with the imaginative to achieve authentic human depth.
Mirrlees’s ability to use story as a lens through which a reader encounters Harrison’s scholarship and Nietzsche’s philosophy in vivid dramatic form made the prospect of a theatrical adaptation irresistible to me.
Persistent Questions
Some overlooked books are best left in the dustbin of history. To me, old literature whose thematic resonance echoes across time into our moment makes a novel worth adapting.
Looking at the synopsis above, it’s easy to see that the core questions Mirrlees posits in 1926 are still relevant today:
What costs does everyone pay when those in power dismiss the beliefs, values and experiences of marginalized or overlooked communities?
How do we reconcile the rational and the magical, the mundane and the imaginative, to find meaning in our lives?
How do societies navigate curiosity, desire, and the need for control, especially when confronting the unknown or forbidden?
At its core, the novel champions the necessity of art, imagination, and creative experience as essential for understanding, resisting, and transcending the constraints of a purely rational world. Though technically a fantasy, the novel is also a modernist meditation on cultural amnesia, the consequences of denying what we cannot fully explain, and the profound importance of art in sustaining human life.
At a time when the cultural landscape is dominated by polarization and secularism, Lud-in-the-Mist feels like the right story for our time.
Surface and Shadow
This criterion is not essential, but whenever I see it, it elevates potential source material above the rest—it tells me the underlying literature will keep me engaged for a long time. I’m drawn to work that combines contrasting elements in a way that feels fresh, surprising, and deeply satisfying. Mirrlees achieves this in Lud-in-the-Mist by creating a story that’s whimsical on the surface but sinister underneath.
Its whimsy shines in the quirky names of the characters—Moonlove Honeysuckle, Ivy Peppercorn, Sebastian Thug—the strange wildlife of Dorimare—white peacocks, blue cows—and the hilariously specific expletives like “Suffering Cats!”, “Busty Bridgett!” and “Toasted Cheese!”
But beneath this whimsical veneer lies the uncanny. The novel’s main character, mayor Nathaniel Chanticleer, is haunted by the sound of a Note he heard in his youth, played on an old instrument found in an attic. He hears the Note at moments when he senses something has gone awry, though he can’t articulate why this familiar sound fills him with unease. Chanticleer also has a proclivity for soul-searching walks in Lud-in-the-Mist’s cemetery, the Fields of Grammery.
More disturbing, the spirit of the deposed Duke Aubrey seems to linger in the shadows, poised for a disruptive return reminiscent of Dionysus in Euripides’s The Bacchae (c. 405 BCE)—notably the one later work of the ancient Greek poets praised by Nietzsche for its portrayal of Dionysian excess. Yet it remains unclear whether the angel-faced Aubrey is plotting revenge on all of Dorimare or harbors other, more ambiguous intentions.
The Adventure Ahead
I hope this essay answers the question that provoked it. Writing it gave me the gift of deeper insight—I see more clearly now how rich with possibilities this source material is.
The exercise of writing this piece also illuminated how ambitious this adaptation will be. Tackling the scale and complexity of Lud-in-the-Mist’s high-fantasy world, faithfully incorporating the novel’s philosophical underpinnings, and assembling a large cast to portray the novel’s myriad distinctive characters will be major hurdles I’ll need to overcome as the project moves forward. But I won’t be doing it alone.
I’m soon to meet with my collaborators who will join me on the wild adventure of adapting this novel for the stage. I’m eager to hear their reactions to the book, to discover how it ignites their artistic impulses, and to explore how we might collaboratively bring Mirrlees’s timeless tale to life.
There will be more to discover about Lud-in-the-Mist as I dive deeper—and I am so grateful to have you, dear reader, along for the ride.
If this journey into Lud-in-the-Mist resonated with you, you can stay connected by subscribing below for future essays and production updates. For those who want to actively fuel the work, a tax-deductible donation to KEVIN RAY | WORKS directly supports the development of this and other new projects.
LUD-IN-THE-MIST is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
KEVIN RAY | WORKS is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Contributions for the charitable purposes of KEVIN RAY | WORKS must be made payable to “Fractured Atlas” only and are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.
Ths Apollonian/Dionysian framing for Lud-in-the-Mist is fascinating. The tension betwene rational order and ecstatic ritual feels incredibly relevant today. My favorite insight here is how theatrical limitation becomes creative strength - using suggestion rather than literal VFX lets audiences co-create the fantasy world. I've always found puppetry especially powerful for this because it sits in that uncanny space between real and imagined, kinda like the fairy fruit itself bridging mundane Dorimare and magical Faerie.
Having read all of Nietzsche as well as J. E. Harrison’s “Prolegomena” and “Themis”, I’m intrigued by your production of the Mirrlees novel. I look forward to hearing how it develops and to seeing the staged result.