Blackeyed Theatre: Frankenstein online

There can be few novels more adapted than Mary Shelley’s Gothic masterpiece – over 200 years old and still maintaining its visceral impact and creeping unease. It’s a wise move to decide to tour with such a well-known story as it guarantees attendance and alleviates a lot of the risk putting on a new play entails. 

The show opens with the captain of an exploratory vessel in the Arctic helping a weak stranger whilst his ship and crew are pursued by something not quite human in the frozen wastelands. Captain Robert Walton (Benedict Hastings) tells the ailing stranger of his ambition to find a new passage to the Pacific and his disregard for human life in pursuit of his place in history. This prompts the stranger (Victor Frankenstein) to recount the terrible story of how his maniacal ambition stole everything good from his life. Frankenstein is played with anguish by Robert Bradley, who develops from an arrogant youth to a haunted man. 

Director Eliot Giuralarocca employs a variety of inventive techniques: the Creature is portrayed using a bunraku puppet (similar to those used in the War Horse and The Lion King). Designed by Yvonne Stone, the anatomy of twisted rope cleverly evokes the muscle and sinew of the human body beneath the skin; its skeletal face, with a malevolent crook in the brow and blank eyes, is eerie and unsettling. The puppet is handled with great skill and nuance by the actors, eyes blinking, chest breathing, giving the impression of life or whatever dreadful imitation the wretched brute inhabits. Billy Irving gives the Creature the surprisingly eloquent voice he has in the original novel – despite his monstrous appearance, he is erudite and heartbreakingly aware of his own monstrosity: “I am not dead… not anymore,” he laments in one memorable line.

Of the effective set design, the director said “The conceit is that, because it starts on the ship, everything that we use to tell the story comes from the ship. Sack and ropes, and so on.” It’s a neat and effective idea. A highly inventive soundscape is created with drums, cymbals, singing bowls and many other unusual instruments to evoke desolate winds of the Arctic, storms and more. 

The production is fairly long at two hours and ten minutes, but it is utterly absorbing, folding the viewer into a story that tackles themes no less than love, human ambition and folly, and life and death itself. Rather like Frankenstein’s monster, this is more than the sum of its parts. 

Jessica Wall

Frankenstein is available to stream from 2^nd March until 27^th March 2022. For further information or to book visit the theatre’s website here.