‘And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper’
Mary Shelley
In 1816 on Lake Geneva an 18 year old girl named, as she still was then, Mary Godwin, had a terrible dream of a Creature assembled from human parts being brought to life. The result was a novel published within two years that was to reach mythical status.
Almost 200 years later, her ‘hideous progeny’ is the toast of the town once more as Danny Boyle presents his sell-out, critically acclaimed production at the National Theatre. But just how has Mary Shelley’s nightmare creation been transformed from page to stage?
NOTE: This feature will contain plot spoilers, so stop reading if you have yet to see the show and want to be surprised.
‘Frankenstein and the Creature literally create each other: every night they reinhabit each other’ Danny Boyle, interview in The Guardian
The most striking aspect of this most recent incarnation of Mary Shelley’s novel is the headline-grabbing double casting of Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller alternating in the roles of Frankenstein and the Creature. As well as proving to be a shrewd marketing tactic, this decision gives the production the opportunity to play with the tale’s inherent ideas of doubling.
Speaking about his adaptation in an interview with The Arts Desk, playwright Nick Dear pointed out that ‘there are so many elements of the Doppelgänger in the original story. Victor Frankenstein is a narcissist – when he comes to create a man, he tries to do so in the image of himself’. By removing the female from the process of reproduction, Frankenstein makes himself sole parent to his creation and it thus becomes his offspring, an implicit extension of himself.
The sharing of these two central roles of creator and creation allows a far more explicit exploration of the link between the two. Boyle has run with Dear’s script and made this almost umbilical connection tangible on the stage; the atmosphere crackles in the moments when Cumberbatch and Miller make physical contact and the production closes with the powerful visual image of their silhouetted figures walking away from the audience, unable right to the end to sever the connection between them.
As fans of the book will recognise, this is not the ending from the novel. Mary Shelley’s tale concludes with the death of Frankenstein while still in pursuit of the Creature, followed by the Creature’s remorseful discovery of his creator’s demise and his resolution to destroy himself; the final image here is of the Creature, alienated in his isolation as he has been throughout the novel. Yet Dear’s ending rightly centres what is the perpetual focus of a consistently thematic adaptation: the relationship between monster and maker.
‘The book has a catalogue of ideas stemming from the radical philosophy of the time it was written. I wanted to put that on stage’ Nick Dear, interview with the BBC
Adaptation is never a simple or easy task, and Frankenstein, despite the legions of different versions it has spawned, is harder than most to re-work for the stage. One of the most distinctive features of Mary Shelley’s novel is its complex and multi-layered narrative, employing not one but two framing narratives; Frankenstein’s story is told in letters by Captain Walton, while the Creature’s story is embedded within this narrative. To translate this complicated structure to the theatre would be impossible, as Dear recognised.
‘Although the story has of necessity had to be trimmed, and I have re-shaped it somewhat, the ambition has always been to express the spirit of Mary Shelley’s novel of ideas as faithfully as possible,’ he told The Arts Desk. This ambition comes across powerfully in a production that, while it may not follow Mary Shelley’s structure, is faithful to the themes that flow through the veins of her creation.
A notable move has been the decision to depart from other stage and film adaptations by humanising the Creature, a figure who is highly articulate and sentient in Mary Shelley’s text. The enduring image of the Creature in our collective cultural psyche is probably Boris Karloff as a monster with a bolt through his neck, a Halloween favourite for generations. This adaptation, however, has no room for monsters.
‘This telling of Shelley’s tale leaves monsters out,’ writes Armand Marie Leroi in the National Theatre’s programme. ‘The thing is called “The Creature”. It is a better name. Monsters are deformities of nature; creatures are created by God, evolution or man. They may be beautiful or terrible and the Creature is a bit of both.’
Frankenstein’s invention is never named, an act of neglect that robs him of his humanity. In early stage productions, the playbills even displayed a blank next to the name of the actor playing the Creature. This omission has led to the common mistaken belief that the Creature is in fact named Frankenstein; a rather appropriate error considering the Creature’s closeness to his creator and counterpart and one that is played on in this new adaptation.
‘they penetrate into the recesses of nature, and show how she works in her hiding places’ Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Another theme that has been foregrounded by Dear is that of gender and sexuality. A novel written by a woman in which the female is usurped and removed entirely from the process of reproduction is one that naturally begs feminist readings. Nature can be seen as mirroring woman and is penetrated by Frankenstein’s masculine force of science; yet this penetration is one that is not sexual but clinical.
Sexuality is central to Dear’s incarnation of Mary Shelley’s text. Frankenstein is here a portrait of frustrated sexuality, as Elizabeth complains that he does not show any interest in her and resists her advances, while the Creature is driven by similar frustration to demand the creation of a mate. Dear’s addition of a shocking scene in which the Creature rapes a helpless Elizabeth serves to make the sexual undercurrents explicit in his adaptation, as the Creature satisfies the desire which Frankenstein has repelled.
In an unsettling world where sex is associated with death, Frankenstein can be seen as compensating for his sexual impotence through an expression of his intellectual power, achieving the greatest scientific invention of all – that of life. Cumberbatch’s interpretation of Frankenstein is of a dazzling but unstable genius, brimming with both arrogance and insecurity. Unfortunately I have not had the opportunity to compare his performance with Miller’s, but it seems to me that the creator’s arrogance is an integral element of this adaptation.
To return to issues of gender, this is also a distinctly masculine production. The focus throughout is the two central male characters and women are marginalised in the narrative as they are in the reproductive process. There are hints of feminism that begin to shine through in Elizabeth’s complaints about women’s lack of education, a detail inserted by Dear, but these soon melt away. Dear defends this by pointing out that the narrators of the novel are all male and says to The Arts Desk that ‘the subject matter seems to me “universal”‘.
‘Frankenstein has had prodigious success as a drama … in the early performances all the ladies fainted and hubbub ensued’ Mary Shelley
This particular translation from page to stage has in any case been phenomenally successful. Dear’s script is by no means perfect and it veers off course slightly in the scenes that stray from Frankenstein and the Creature; he, like the audience, does not seem as interested in periphery characters. His thematic approach, however, seems the most logical way to unpack Mary Shelley’s ideas and present them in a new way.
This project has been, as Boyle and Dear have explained, a slow-burner. The idea of staging Frankenstein was first discussed between the pair in the early 1990s when they were working together on The Last Days of Don Juan at the RSC but was abandoned when Kenneth Branagh made his 1994 film version. The time away from the project does not seem to have done it any harm and this production is more relevant than ever as we continue to question the ethics of scientific advances.
Mary Shelley was certainly ahead of her time. The difficult questions that she tackles in Frankenstein are ones that we are still asking now as science puts us all in the position of Mary Shelley’s protagonist, daring to play God. Ladies may no longer faint in the aisles, but this tale still has the power to shock in many respects and I would venture to predict that Mary Shelley’s ‘hideous progeny’ will have a theatrical life, in some form or another, for many years to come.
