Dr Frankenstein is translated from a he to a she: Victor becomes Victoria. As the auditorium lights dim, a crashing chord jolts us into attentiveness (Nick John Williams’s sound design, here and throughout, is both dramatically sharp and emotionally atmospheric). A young woman faces out from the stage into the darkness. She delivers a lecture on the human brain. Between her and us stands a table topped by a prostrate form covered by a white sheet. Who is she? Where are we? What is that? Questions jostle against memories of multiple versions of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s 200-year-old novel. An interruption offers a surprising orientation and we are launched into the particularities of Selma Dimitrijevic’s adaptation as directed by Lorne Campbell.
What follows does not live up to the promise of this attention-catching set-up. The time is approximately 19th century. Aspects of Wollstonecraft Shelley’s personal history, such as the testing relationship between father and intelligent, ambitious daughter, are interpolated into a fiction that alternates between the Frankenstein family home in England (with its emphasis on domesticity) and Victoria’s laboratory at university in Bavaria (where, swapping frock for trews, she experiments with the line between life and death). Tensions between these radically different settings never quite reach their potential dramatic pitch.
Although the opening offers the only lecture, an educational tone persists: in stilted dialogue, thinly drawn characters convey ideas and attitudes around issues of class, education, religion, science and the place of women in society. Polly Frame’s performance, while spirited, doesn’t knit Victoria’s disparate elements into a convincing whole. Other actors do their best within limited scope (Rachel Denning’s Justine is particularly affecting). In what feels like an unfinished production, only Ed Gaughan’s Creature (gendered as in Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel) seems fully realised. • At Northern Stage, Newcastle until 11 March. Box office: 0191 230 5151
