Play Review: Frankenstein

(Pictures edited from Pixabay, I normally use my own photos, but I thought this looked cool. 😉 )

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley is one of my favorite novels, so I thought I would watch both versions of the play that Benedict Cumberbatch and Johny Lee Miller starred in. The London National Theatre's YouTube channel posted this 2011 production because of the quarantine. The actors interchange roles each night. I only got to watch one version of the play and I hope I will get to watch the second someday. The London National Theatre is posting free plays here each week.

I watched the version with Benedict Cumberbatch as Victor Frankenstein, and Johny Lee Miller as the creature. I thought I should write a blog post about it, and compare and contrast it with the book. In my review I talk about what I liked about the play and what I may have done differently if I were to direct it.

     
                                                         The Trailer: 

                                                       You can also watch it here

 My thoughts on this telling of Frankenstein      

 In Nick Dear's version of Frankenstein, when it was adapted to the stage, Dear decided to cut bits of the story either because of the amount actors were able to memorize or because of the length of the play, which couldn't probably be ten hours long. They had to shorten, and convert the story to play form, and Dear had to decide what creative liberties he wanted to take.

One dramatic difference in the play was that unlike the book, the monster and Victor were not in the play completely evenly. I thought the characters would have equal stage time, considering the fact that the actors switch roles every showing. However, the director's interpretation seems to be focusing on the monster's side of things, as opposed to portraying Victor and the monster equally. The book though told through the point of view of Victor, has many chapters featuring the monster's point of view.

Mary Shelley's novel was told from Victor's point of view looking back, and realizing his mistakes, while the play is told in the present tense, and Victor tends not to be as regretful for his actions. As Victor is telling the story in the book, to Walton who rescued him, and Victor refuses to give any information to him about the creation of life because he "will not lead you on, unguarded and ardent as I was, to your destruction and infallible misery" (79). This shows that Victor at least cares and knows that his actions have consequences, but that realization is because he went through a long turmoil, and lost everyone in his family including his wife, Elizabeth.

Victor in the play is ruthless and careless, and not regretting his actions. I do believe this matches up with the Victor in the present tense, as opposed to the Victor telling the story in the book. Though the Victor telling the story, may have been biased, he included what the monster had told him, which is something that present tense Victor would not have done. It felt like in the story that Victor at least was trying not to make the same mistakes again.

The play does not gloss over Victor's grave robbing for resources to create the monster and the monster's wife. Victor "pursued nature to her hiding-places. Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave or tortured the living animal to the lifeless clay?" (82-83) Many of his toils to find the secrets of life and grave robbing are mentioned throughout. Even when he is in Scotland Victor gets horrified looks from people when he asks them to rob graves, and in his monologue about finding the creation of life he mentions it, but says he can't reveal the secrets. (This is a clip of Johny Lee Miller playing Victor in the version I did not see, but these are the same lines that Benedict Cumberbatch spoke in the version I did see):

You can also watch it here

This pays homage to his conversation in the book.

In terms of focus on the monster, the play did a good job with shifting to his perspective and telling the story in the way the monster would have experienced it. Since a majority of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is related by Victor even though includes the monster's point of view, the playwright had to take creative liberties to tell the monster's entire side of the story. Because of this, the play opens with the scene where the monster comes to life, rather than with Victor and his process of creating the monster. In the play the monster is first shown as coming out of a large egg, which almost gives him a human and yet inhuman birth, being fully grown at birth is not a very human thing to have happen, however, we are familiar with a human egg. In the novel it is never exactly told how Victor brought the monster to life, so people had to use their own imagination regarding that subject.
I feel the play pays attention to what Mary Shelley's words, as the monster ventures out and a "strange multiplicity of sensations seized [him], and [he] saw, felt, and smelt at the same time" (184). The audience is shown how the world is overwhelming to the monster, and lights flash around the stage, and he knows not the rules of the world as he ventures out. The play stays true to the book in memorable details such as when the monster accidentally steals food from people without realizing that he is doing something bad, or when he doesn't know his own strength and accidentally kills William (Victor's brother).

The trial of Justine is an important part of the book, showing that someone Victor trusts is wrongly convicted as a murderer for a crime the monster committed. Victor doesn't say anything in fear that he will look insane, and this event affects both the monster and Victor badly. It is a complex emotional moral moment in the novel and it is left out of the play. Shelley writes that the monster was regretful that he killed William, because the monster had wanted to become friends with William because he thought William "was unprejudiced and had lived too short a time to have imbibed a horror of deformity" (268). However, this plan backfires and the monster ends up killing William. After William's death and Justine's execution, both of which troubled Victor, Victor begins to become more and more depressed and often in the present tense he "suffered living torture. It was to be decided whether the result of my curiosity and lawless devices would be the death of my two fellow beings: one a smiling babe full of innocence and joy, the other far more dreadfully murdered, with every aggravation of infamy that makes murder memorable in my horror." (139) Because Victor feels regretful and depressed over the two loved ones he has lost due to the monster, Victor wants to spend more time alone and as a consequence his family becomes worried about him. Because of the elimination of this sequence from the play, with only the monster feeling  regret now and Victor feeling none, the audience is more inclined to feel empathy towards the monster and hatred towards Victor. In the play instead of being regretful, Victor is upset that his studies are interrupted.  Omitting the trial makes the story go from being morally gray to black and white, not allowing the audience to make their own choices of which character or characters they agree with.

However, I thought a neat choice was made to the scene when Elizabeth was killed by the monster. The reader does not know how Elizabeth felt in the novel but here, she pitied him just before he killed her. This adds depth to the monster's side of the story. In the novel we don't get to know if there was any conversation going on between Elizabeth and the monster, or if it merely was that she was killed not knowing who killed her. In the play Victor says that he created life, he only says to her that he has "one secret, Elizabeth, a dreadful one; when revealed to you, it will chill your frame with horror, and then, far from being surprised at my misery, you will wonder that I survive what I have endured" (368). He never gets to reveal her the secret in the book and as far as we know in the book, the monster never gives her this information either. So, I think the choice in the play to have Elizabeth feel empathy towards the monster, and interest in Victor's science, was well done. It makes the side of the monster's story more complex.

Another change to the story centers around the characters of Agatha and Felix, who are not siblings, but husband and wife in this version. In the book there is a much more involved story surrounding another woman named Safie, who Felix was in love with.  To strengthen the monster's part of the story the playwright chose to enlarge the character of Agatha and Felix's father, because he probably didn't want the monster monologuing the whole time. In order to create dialogue the monster had to be friends with Agatha and Felix's father. The old man is also changed from a minor character into a major character, and like Elizabeth had much more affect on the plot in this version than in the book.

The character of the old man became a mentor to the monster in a more personal and significant way in the play. In Shelley's novel Felix, Agatha, and their father were all mentors, the monster admired them, but didn't ever directly talk with them. The old man assumed the monster had been through a war when they first met in the play, so he was less afraid of him. His reaction was very different than Felix's and Agatha's, who shunned him because he looked frightening and showed the type of human nature that had hurt the monster before.

The scenes involving the old man and the monster follow the book, but create a dialogue between the two characters where there was none before. So,  the old man directly teaches the monster "Paradise Lost"  rather than the monster learning by himself to read from Safie's learning of English and finding the "Paradise Lost" later.  This is a neat change, but very different from the book, because the monster has an actual friend and teacher. Later in the play the monster directly references "Paradise Lost" in front of Victor, and Victor understands the quote immediately and was surprised that the monster knew about it. Since the play is somewhat abridged they had to show that the monster cared about classic literature, and that he had learned from that. And since this isn't Victor recalling what the monster said him, and instead the monster in the present having things happen to him, it had to be shown that the monster was learning in a short span. 

Unlike the book the wife of the monster was directly discussed with the old man, there was a small dream sequence of what the monster wanted her to be like. Since this was mainly focused on the monster, we get to see what he wants most in life, and that he wants someone like him.

Later in the play the discussion between the monster and Victor (this is again the version with Johny Lee Miller as Victor Frankenstein) was very similar to what the discussion was like in the book: 

You can also watch it here

One line taken directly from the book is from the scene when Victor tries to kill the monster, and the monster cries in response "you accuse me of murder and yet you would, with a satisfied conscience, destroy your own creature." (180)  This quote becomes even stronger in representing the director's point, because it comes directly after Victor tried to physically kill the monster in this portrayal.

With the monster's desire for someone like him, the audience is asked to empathize with him, because he wants a friend, someone who won't turn him away. For he has "never yet seen a being resembling me or who any intercourse with me. What was I?" (225) Because of his wonder, of where he was, who he was, we, the audience, want him to be loved by someone. So when he makes the deal with Victor, we hope it succeeds, we hope Victor decides to bring the new creation that is to be his wife to life. The monster feels lonely, so perhaps now in the time of being quarantined we are empathizing with that too right now even though the play itself was performed nine years ago. But we, too, like the monster haven't really gotten to talk to people like us, so we, too, are lonely and longing for someone to be with and love. It is something about human nature that makes us not want to be alone. 

By choosing to tell the play from the monster's point of view, we, as the audience, are supposed to cheer the monster on. Had it been told from both perspectives, I believe there might be an empathy perhaps towards both characters (Victor and the monster). The audience is now supposed to see Victor Frankenstein as the obstacle, so when Victor breaks his promise to the monster we as the audience are angry at him. 

My only critique with this version of Victor Frankenstein, was that perhaps he wasn't as complex as he was in the book. I always saw both Victor and the monster as equally complex characters with motives that made sense. For the most part the director decided that both characters and audience should be disgusted by Victor to the extent that the audience might be booing at him. When I read the book (which is very different from the way in which the director and screenwriter read it), I saw them both as similar people, who had motives that opposed each other. The monster wanted to be loved, but Victor didn't want to love the monster and was afraid of the monster. I didn't really see one character as worse than the other, I saw them both as characters who had been through a lot and made decisions that they regretted. They were both morally gray, but in the play I feel like the monster is good and Victor is bad instead of having there be blurred lines in between it. 

Benedict Cumberbatch (and I am sure Johny Lee Miller too, though I never saw his portrayal) did a good job of making the audience not like him. His character was always hiding, and ran away from the monster in disgust, he paid little to no attention to Elizabeth and turned her down when she asked to help him with his scientific work, and he robbed graves. In a lot ways the play made Victor's character pretty unlikable. As a director and a screenwriter I probably would have gone in a different route when directing and writing both the roles of Victor and the monster. 

At the end however, the story didn't feel completely finished. The last scene in the play left the story as Victor and the monster were traveling across the world running off into the unknown, but unlike the novel they don't die at the end on stage. There was a small moment where it seemed like Victor was going to die or was dying, but it turned out not to be the case. Instead we were left with a small cliffhanger. To me the story felt unfinished, and while the ending of the novel is sad, it is sad to illustrate a point.  To leave the play with no conclusion feels dissatisfying. It would have been better, to tell the story from the monster's point of view, and then show the ending how the monster would have experienced it. Mourning the loss of Victor would be very powerful to see from the monster's point of view. Though it was hinted at a little in the play what this would be like, that the monster couldn't live without Victor, because Victor was the creator of him and he was the monster's purpose for being alive, it never led to this sad conclusion...Which left me wondering, "is that the end?" because it really didn't feel like it.

When coming to this play I was expecting a play that would tell the story from both sides (Victor and the monster) instead, it ended up being a retelling from the monster's point of view. It was a very good one, and emphasized the monster's part of the story. I can see other versions of the story being told as well, given that people interpret Frankenstein in very different ways. If I were to do a play version of Frankenstein, my take or takes on the story would be very different from this director's, or even if you (the reader) were to, I'm sure yours would be different too.

                                                               

  My Thoughts on the costumes, props and sets 
The sets were amazing, they created moving sets that went below or underground, while actors were directly sitting or standing on them. The train is one prop worth mentioning also, given that London National Theatre provided a clip of it:

You can also watch it here

Overall, the play had a very metallic feeling to it. It emphasized more of the science in the world instead of contrasting Victor's scientific research with nature. In the novel a majority of Shelley's writing involved Victor describing the landscapes and usually they were of importance and showed something of the current situation. I can see that the director's choice was to focus on the science of the story, because most of the sets (and even sound effects) had a mechanical feeling to them. They also projected what Victor was doing on fabric when he was creating the monster's wife, rather like a shadow puppet in that way. I believe this was supposed to add wonder to what he was creating, for we would never see him directly do his work on stage.  The sets themselves were amazing! And I imagine all the other sets by this company will be equally as amazing. 

                                                           My overall rating for the play is: 

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Have you seen this production of Frankenstein? If so which version did you enjoy watching the most? 

-Quinley