Theatre review: Frankenstein, Perth Theatre


Frankenstein, Perth Theatre ***
At the heart of this version stands Eilidh Loan’s Mary Shelley, the author; not so much the haunted, brilliant and devastatingly bereaved girl of Liz Lochhead’s Shelley play Blood and Ice, but rather a young punk-inflected intellectual avenger in a long leather coat, inventing her brilliant young rationalist hero Victor Frankenstein – a man strikingly similar in type to her husband, the poet Percy Shelley – so that she can inflict upon him the greatest emotional suffering any human being can imagine, including the eventual death of everyone he loves, at the hands of the monster he has created.
It is, to put it mildly, an interesting take on the driving impulse behind this archetypal horror story. In Patricia Benecke’s as-yet slightly chaotic production, Loan pulls out every available stop to make it work, capturing the ruthless horror of Mary’s vision but adding a distinctive layer of ironic, vengeful sarcasm about men like Victor and their pretensions. She meets her match in Michael Moreland’s Monster, an evidently human creature driven to murderous rage by his creator’s failure to love and accept him, and Ben Castle Gibb, as Victor, just about manages to keep pace with them, alternating between standard mid-Victorian pomposity and a driven hyper-rationalist madness.
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Hide AdElsewhere, though, the small cast of seven seem a shade overstretched and under-rehearsed. They relentlessly double and treble characters, and flickfrom one scenario to another, on Becky Minto’s evocative two-storey set, with not quite enough in the way of visual and theatrical cues. By the end, there’s a tantalising feeling of a show that fully grasps the enduring power of Mary Shelley’s story but somehow never quite gives itself time, or finds the right tone, fully to explore its implications, in areas from sexual politics to looming environmental disaster, and that, by choosing to highlight a single, slightly reductive view of Mary’s motives, often cuts off its own lines of emotional inquiry, just when they are becoming most interesting. Joyce McMillan
Perth Theatre, until 21 September; King’s Theatre, Edinburgh, 21-26 October; Theatre Royal, Glasgow, 25-30 November; His Majesty’s Aberdeen, 4-8 February.