Review of National Theatre Live: Frankenstein (2011) by Tarma T — 11 Nov 2014

I don't know if I hate it more when I feel like the only one who loves something, or the only one who hates something. At the moment I appear to be the only one who hated this play.

I will start by saying that there were a handful of moments that I loved. The Creature's first moments of sun, birdsong, grass, rain... beautiful. Wonderful. The moment when the Creature's bride is revealed... also beautiful.

But I have so many bones to pick and come away with so little meat that I enjoyed, I can't help but move on to explain just how much I found to dislike about this play.

First, the dialogue. Lord, how I hated the dialogue.

The man who plays Victor's father seems to feel that all his lines must be shouted and all at the same pitch - the line "you speak all your part at once, cues and all!" came to mind every time he wandered onto the stage to spew out some more lines Shelley never actually gave him. The sad thing is it still could have been good, if delivered better. During his longest scene, an argument with Victor just after William's death, I began repeating his lines in my head using emphasis and pitch to make the lines varied, and realized that the scene ought to have been a very emotionally strained one. But the actor seemed in a hurry and spit out all his lines as if he had somewhere else to be.

I despised Elizabeth every time she came on screen because she had nothing of interest to say and took a lot of time to say it. And oh god, the rape scene. Yes, I said 'rape scene'. UGH. That just felt excessively... excessive. Ridiculously gratuitous. Possibly it was because they cut several other deaths (Victor's mother, Justine, Clerval, Victor's father) and they realized that somehow they had to find another way to make sure we really understood how monsterous the monster really is, but uhhh... the kids sitting in the front row burst into nervous giggling when it happened. It was almost cartoonish in its 'LOOK HOW EVIL' attitude. And before that, we watched a scene that never, ever happened in the book - Elizabeth and the Creature getting to be BFFs. UGH! NO! STOP! You could have fit another character's death into that scene and saved us both the scenes I just described! IMO, Elizabeth was a much better tragic figure in the book, where she died violently and *off-stage*. She was simply one more in a long trail of blood and tears that the Creature left behind it as it tore through Victor's life.

And Victor's feelings for Elizabeth! How often did the novel emphasize just what he felt for her? She was from the very beginning the great love of his life, and loved by everyone, and her sudden death mid-novel is one of the worst blows to fall in Victor's life. And yet in the play he pushes her away again and again, never showing how he felt, just saying a few words now and again to say "oh right yes, my fiancee, very nice girl, that... what was her name again?" Hell, he loved his entire family. It was his loss of connection with each of them before their deaths that broke him as much as it was the actual deaths, and Elizabeth's was the worst of all:

She left me, and I continued some time walking up and down the passages of the house and inspecting every corner that might afford a retreat to my adversary. But I discovered no trace of him and was beginning to conjecture that some fortunate chance had intervened to prevent the execution of his menaces when suddenly I heard a shrill and dreadful scream. It came from the room into which Elizabeth had retired. As I heard it, the whole truth rushed into my mind, my arms dropped, the motion of every muscle and fibre was suspended; I could feel the blood trickling in my veins and tingling in the extremities of my limbs. This state lasted but for an instant; the scream was repeated, and I rushed into the room. Great God! Why did I not then expire! Why am I here to relate the destruction of the best hope and the purest creature on earth? She was there, lifeless and inanimate, thrown across the bed, her head hanging down and her pale and distorted features half covered by her hair. Everywhere I turn I see the same figure-her bloodless arms and relaxed form flung by the murderer on its bridal bier. Could I behold this and live? Alas! Life is obstinate and clings closest where it is most hated. For a moment only did I lose recollection; I fell senseless on the ground.

What a scene this could have made! That piercing shriek from off-stage across an echoing stage, and a bed rising with the corpse of a woman who was only just seen alive moments before, in a loving and gentle embrace with Victor. Instead they have another fight, he pushes her coldly away again, and then we are treated to the whole BFF scene and I'm kind of glad when the Creature finally gets around to killing her if only to end that scene.

The supporting cast felt seriously extraneous (unsurprising in a story about two men slowly becoming more and more obsessed with the other until all else fades to nothing). Comic relief in Frankenstein is... well, there is *some* room for a bit of sympathetic laughter while the Creature is learning some of life's lessons, but good lord, the lighter the hand in adding it, the better. The two Scottish men were my biggest complaint - they completely broke apart one of the most intense scenes in the book. Or... well, they would have, only the dialogue between man and monster was not Shelley's, but the playwright's. And that right there is my biggest complaint against this play. The movie version of the play starts out with an introduction discussing how they "gave the Creature back his voice", only... no they didn't. The playwright gave the Creature the *playwright's* voice. There was very little of Mary's original text in this play, and that is sad as hell, because the Creature of the book has the most beautiful speeches, filled with violence and love and hate and despair and reason and beauty and desperation. In this play they have him quote Milton a few times to show how 'educated' he is, and then they give him a speech impediment. He spits and drools and stutters and slurs. Lord, what a difference from the novel, where Shelley gives us over *six chapters* in one go that are nothing but beautiful speech from the Creature, beginning with:

"I expected this reception," said the daemon. "All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. You purpose to kill me. How dare you sport thus with life? Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind. If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends.".

Perhaps it was my own fault for going in with the hope that it would be truer to the novel, but... I felt that it was trying to pretend to be the novel, while really wandering right off the track whenever it felt like it.

The final problem I had, and I admit this is a tough one for anyone to solve, was how rushed it felt. The novel has the most amazing sensation of timelessness - perhaps because one starts from the end, seeing Victor as a broken, dying man, and then travels with him back to the very beginning. It is a slow novel, but the very pace of it is what makes it so good. It builds up so quietly and so steadily that you hardly remember when you moved from the beauty of the Creature's time in the woods to the freezing horror of the north. In the play they have so little time that they leap from one scene to the next, ripping out huge chunks of the story, and still trying to imbue us with that rising tension that Shelley gave us that ended at the end of the world.

And OH, that last scene. So beautiful and full of pathos in the novel... so full of someone else's idea of "how it should end" in the play.

Augh! I could go on and on. All I can say is that I did not like it, I rather wish I had not seen it, but since I do not see how some of the problems I underline can be overcome in a movie version, I will probably never see a version of Frankenstein in my life that I enjoy, so with that said, feel free to ignore me and go watch the play and enjoy it with all your heart. You won't be alone!