It's the teenager's trump card in every parental row. "I didn't ask to be born." Who could deny it? Even the most dissolute mother or father must accept responsibility for the act of bringing life. All of us can blame our parents for the existential mess we're in.
As Liz Lochhead sees it, Mary Shelley was one parent who accepted that responsibility and was duly tormented by it. In Blood and Ice, Lochhead's evocation of the romance between Mary and Percy Shelley, the monster's voice is always there to haunt her: "Frankenstein, why did you make me?"
For it seems to Mary that she is the progenitor of all her woes: "Frankenstein's Frankenstein". First, there is the legacy of her most famous story, published when she was 21 and never eclipsed in the popular imagination; then there are her flesh and blood children who died in infancy; and finally there are her youthful romantic ideals that crumble in the face of harsh experience.
It's in this last aspect that Graham McLaren's revival is at its most powerful. His production brilliantly charts Mary's journey from youthful zest to mature restraint, juxtaposing the heady period in 1816, when the Shelleys joined Lord Byron and his mistress Claire Clairemont on the shores of Lake Geneva, with the vision of an older, lonely Mary, defeated by life and let down by her friends.
In the lead role, red-headed Lucianne McEvoy gives a radiant performance that captures the effervescence of youth and the depths of the despair that followed. With Alex Hassell as an arrogant "bad" Byron, Phil Matthews as a flighty "mad" Percy and Susan Coyle as a deluded Claire, the production has as keen a grasp on the youthful sexual tensions and sparks as it does on Lochhead's darker reflections on the nature of female creativity.
· Until November 15. Box office: 0131-248 4848.
