Operated by the puppeteers and filmed with a small camera, it looked larger, ghastlier, something like the “hideous progeny” that Shelley described. (When she wrote the book, Shelley had recently lost a newborn and her own mother had died from postpartum complications, scenes the play stages, so progeny was not necessarily a happy or neutral idea.)

The technology in Shelley’s novel is so forward-looking that we still haven’t caught up to it. If you’ve read the novel, you’ll know this is a good thing. The technology of this “Frankenstein” is deliberately backward looking. Yes, there’s a camera. Yes, there’s electricity independent of lightning. But puppetry, magic lanterns, the painted scene unspooling slowly between two poles — a device called a crankie — all these would have been familiar to Shelley.