Friday March 29, 2024
Frankenstein
Review

Frankenstein

December 3 2008

Frankenstein Wharf 2, Sydney Theatre Company, 3-13 December 2008; www.sydneytheatre.com.au

MARY SHELLEY wrote Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus in 1818. Although she was a prolific writer of novels, plays and other prose, her name has been synonymous with the novel ever since. Nevertheless, her inheritance was her father’s (small “l”) liberal politics and her mother’s social radicalism and Frankenstein isn’t merely a “horror” story. Rather, it can be read as a comment on English society of the time: the brutality of Industrialism and the failure of Romanticism to halt its progress; or a comment on the position of the artist in an unsympathetic society. Whichever you choose, the story of the scientist who creates a living being only to realise that, in classic fashion, he’s got what he wished for, continues to resonate in the 21st century as the exploration of inner space – DNA, cloning and IVF, for instance – continue to push back the boundaries of what was once possible in terms of “life”.

The creature we think of when the name Frankenstein is mentioned is not the scientist, Victor Frankenstein, but his “monster”, played in 1931 by Boris Karloff in a way that has dominated imagery of the character ever since. This creature is huge, shambling, menacing, with a bolt through his neck and a simian brow, above it a massive, misshapen forehead looms – he is monstrous.

In the book Dr Frankenstein comments of his creation: “I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I have deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I have finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.”

In 2008 at Wharf 2 for Wharf2Loud, Lally Katz has taken the ideas another step further out. In her Frankenstein Katz turns the “monster” idea on its head by having the Doctor (Ben Winspear) assemble a creature who is revealed as a cute young woman (Yael Stone) in white shorts and singlet. In an instant all previous ideas of what Frankenstein means are banished and a new and rather disturbing reality takes its place.

In a 50 minute experiment that includes a bit of singing, Brechtian scene cards and the excellent device of sucking in the audience with laughter and cuddliness before delivering a whack over the head with a mallet, Frankenstein is a quirky and imaginative theatre work.

The original story is adhered to, in the main, although when Monster comes to life her first experience is an audio tape of bird calls. This means she hears willy wagtails before she hears a human voice and learns to make koel and magpie sounds before words. It’s an endearing scene and makes what is to happen – loneliness, betrayal, murder and revenge – all the more confronting.

Frankenstein

Designer Ralph Myers is also the director of this collaborative piece (his debut in the role) and linking these two jobs demonstrates he is good at both. It makes for a seamless, well-worked out production, with Nick Schlieper’s washes of stark white light illuminating the bare, black painted space when not leaving it in a post-industrial gloom.

The two performers – aided by dead-pan walk-on contributions by the other members of the backstage team including Lally Katz – bring a surprising level of thought provocation to what is, at first glance, a wacky bit of nonsense. But if, much later, you find yourself thinking about the fate of the Monster, then you may decide that wacky is the least of it.

In a review of the book by John Wilson Croker, published in Quarterly Review in 1818, he wrote: “The dreams of insanity are embodied in the strong and striking language of the insane, and the author, notwithstanding the rationality of his preface, often leaves us in doubt whether he is not as mad as his hero.”

At the time, of course, he – and many others – doubted that young Mrs Shelley could have written the book and attributed it instead to her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and also the author of the preface mentioned above. Enough to make you get up off the laboratory table and start doing a little light strangling.

 

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