Frankenstein by Mary Shelley: in a new adaptation by April De Angelis. Directed by Matthew Xia.

The Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, UK.

A review by Tristan Burke

In the bicentennial year of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester has mounted a remarkably faithful adaptation of the novel as it was originally published. April De Angelis’s script, directed by Matthew Xia, captures both the thrilling pace of Shelley’s fable and maintains fidelity to its searching intellectual concerns.

The focus here is squarely on the 1818 text of the novel, rather than the revised edition of 1831. This earlier version, written in the long, looming shadow of the French Revolution, the contested events of the Reign of Terror and the Thermidorean Reaction, and the rise of Napoleon’s Empire, is a novel of political philosophy, a laboratory for thinking through the implications of the declaration of the rights of man and the possibilities of democracy. By contrast, previous adaptations have tended to adopt the concerns of the 1831 edition, with its increased focus on the overweening power of science to encroach on the prerogatives of God and the moral implications thereof. Most famous of these is James Whale’s 1931 film for Universal Studios, now impossible to separate from any attempt to think about Frankenstein. Boris Karloff’s iconic portrayal of the Creature, with dead eyes, outsized head and a bolt through the neck, dominates the popular imagination. In another scene that particularly upset the censors when thoroughgoing censorship of Hollywood cinema was introduced in 1934, a frenzied and neurotic Frankenstein triumphantly declares himself to have become a god.

Against these familiar images, De Angelis’s script seems determined to bring out the concerns of 1818 and resist the temptation to fall back on clichés. Much of the dialogue is lifted straight from the novel and the novel’s keywords are threaded through the script: ‘rights’, ‘creature/creator’, ‘monster’, ‘reason’, ‘man’. This is a play about the political claims of the ‘other’ in its encounter with society, provoking the questions: How does one come into personhood? What political rights does that instil? Can recourse to violence be justified when those rights are not met? When can an individual’s rights be legitimately refused?

This intellectual fidelity to the text is, however, sometimes disrupted by another type of fidelity to the novel’s 1818 incarnation: its breakneck pace. We are moved from episode to episode so quickly that there is little time to think through these questions, and the wider significance of key scenes remains obscure. This is particularly true of much of the Creature’s narrative. We are not given enough time to think about the Creature’s own political-intellectual development, let alone the complex parallels between the Creature and Safie, which are set up so carefully and at such length by Shelley. Instead, Safie’s brief appearances in the play might even be somewhat confusing to viewers with no prior knowledge of the text. The speed of the production also imbues the events with a tragic inevitability; where the Creature’s ostracisation and violence in the novel is a result of societal texture and political decision, here it becomes fatalistic.

Nevertheless, what is lost in intellectual complexity is gained in theatrical excitement. The play is genuinely frightening. Particularly effective are a series of set piece thrills. When Frankenstein animates the Creature, it occurs in an electrical explosion followed by utter darkness. We hear him groping around to light a candle, and something else moving around. A match flares, the only light on stage. And around the edges of this weak light we see a huge lumbering figure, as though from the corner of our eye, though all our eyes are turned on it. At other times, trapdoors are opened in the floor to reveal confused piles of viscera, as though the entire narrative is built on some originary, obscure act of immense violence. Perhaps in echo of another memorable scene in Whale’s 1931 picture, when Frankenstein completes the Creature’s female companion, her hand violently, unexpectedly grasps his wrist. And there are some gloriously nauseating sound effects when Frankenstein is working on their bodies.

At the centre of this compelling dread is the Creature himself, in a remarkable performance by Harry Attwell. Attwell moves in what could, perhaps paradoxically, be described as a lumbering scuttle, both inhuman and all-too-human in its depressive pathos. His voice too is both imperious and full of blasted solitude. Also striking is his costume, when there is enough light to see it, his back a patchwork of glistening segments of corpses. The other performances are workmanlike and effective, though don’t quite reach the heights of Atwell’s central turn: Shane Zaza’s Frankenstein’s arrogance is tempered by the sense that he can’t quite believe what’s happened to him; Ryan Gage’s public school buffoon Walton offers comic relief before being chastened by the denouement; and it is regrettable that Shanaya Rafaat’s intriguing tripling as Elizabeth, Safie and Margaret is not given enough stage time to draw out the parallels between these characters except in a feminist reading of their silence in the story, embodied by Margaret’s ghostlike appearance to Walton in the final scene.

The Royal Exchange is a theatre-in-the-round, and much of this pace and horror is built on the sparsity of the staging. There’s no possibility for elaborate sets which could block views so instead, events are boiled down to their primal situations. Of course, this means the importance of sublime landscapes is lost (it’s hard to imagine how this could ever be rendered on stage but I’d love to see a designer try), but new pathways of interpretations are opened up.

The framing narrative of the novel is particularly strongly stressed. I imagine many productions would dispose of it entirely in favour of the immediacy of the story, but here Walton is kept on stage throughout, sitting and watching like a member of the audience in his captain’s chair (a subtle implication of some sort of authority over the narrative?), and even interjects in Frankenstein’s narration. We are never allowed to forget that what we are seeing is a series of nested stories, and as such the importance of narrativising in the constitution of human subjectivity is brought to the fore.

The production design also offers new pathways for interpretation. Creating complex connections between the narratives are the network of thick cables that criss-cross the theatre space from ceiling to floor, serving as the rigging of Walton’s ship, the electric apparatus in Frankenstein’s laboratory, and the hangman’s noose which condemns Justine. Unfortunately, other aspects of the design are less satisfying. Particularly glaring, and bordering on egregious, are anachronisms in costume design. During Frankenstein’s wedding scene, the men are in Regency clothes while the women are in Madame de Pompadour wigs and dresses, presumably because the director and designer wanted to throw a creepy masked ball into the mix. This is a relatively minor flaw, though, in a production that is characterised by theatrical excitement and intellectual seriousness and consistency. The Royal Exchange’s production of Frankenstein is an exciting work of art in its own right and does honour to the continuing power and importance of its still extraordinary source material.

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Tristan Burke completed his PhD, entitled ‘Mutations of Heroism in Nineteenth-Century Modernity’ at the University of Manchester in 2018. He is currently working on a study of the political aesthetics of terrorism, from Frankenstein to The Secret Agent.