There are said to be more than 55 theatrical adaptations of Mary Shelley’s landmark novel. If April De Angelis has added one more to the mix, it is because the book is celebrating the 200th anniversary of its publication. But while this new version is highly enjoyable, nimbly blends gothic horror and moral parable, and is extremely well directed by Matthew Xia, I don’t feel it radically alters one’s perception of this much-analysed story.
De Angelis’s most original touch is to keep Captain Walton, the Arctic explorer who frames the narrative, on stage throughout. It is Walton who, in letters to his sister, recounts his meeting with Victor Frankenstein and learns of the scientist’s presumptuous attempt to play God by animating matter and bringing to life the Creature. By keeping Walton constantly visible, De Angelis draws an intriguing parallel between him and Frankenstein.
Both embody the over-reaching nature of male ambition: one wants to conquer the pole, the other to create new life. The key difference is that Frankenstein’s obsession proves fatally destructive whereas Walton’s humanity makes him abandon his quest: a point here underlined by the fact that Shanaya Rafaat plays both Frankenstein’s sacrificed fiancee and Walton’s welcoming sister.
That all makes sense and reinforces the idea that this is ultimately a story about hubris: De Angelis closely follows the arc of Shelley’s narrative and even shows the eponymous hero ransacking tombs and engaging in cultish rituals to raise the dead.
But, while De Angelis gives us much more of Frankenstein’s story than Nick Dear did in his 2011 National Theatre version, in which Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller alternated the leads, she downplays Shelley’s preoccupation with social injustice. This is a political novel, among much else, but we lose the tragic back story of the persecuted French exiles with whom the Creature seeks refuge. I was also sorry to see no reference to the Creature’s self-education through reading Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives, and The Sorrows of Young Werther, which gives him a grounding in the epic, history and doomed romance.
What does come across clearly is the idea of the Creature – more sinned against than sinning – as a sad victim of Frankenstein’s disastrous experiments. Xia’s production successfully combines empathy with the abused Creature with a delight in spooky effects that a Hammer horror would not be ashamed of. Ben Stones’s design embraces ships, storms, charnel-houses and blood-soaked chambers and the first appearance of the Creature, seemingly impaled on a laboratory table, is genuinely chilling. All I missed was Shelley’s evocation of the beauties of nature as opposed to the bestialities of man.
You could say that Harry Attwell as the Creature runs off with the show, except that great play is made of the fact that his stitched-up limbs, owing to Frankenstein’s voraciousness, are a far-from-perfect match: it is, anyway, a performance that duly combines the touching and the terrifying. Shane Zaza, though not always easy to hear, conveys Frankenstein’s manic zeal and belated guilt, and Ryan Gage as Walton made me wonder if the captain has a bit of a thing for the doctor. It all makes for a vivid, technically adroit evening. But am I alone in feeling that Shelley’s novel, for all its mythic power and pioneering virtues, is far from inexhaustible?
• At the Royal Exchange, Manchester, until 14 April. Box office: 0161-833 9833.
