Frankenstein re-animated for a modern world
Frankenstein at the Oxford Playhouse from Thursday, February 29 to Saturday, March 2
Review by JON LEWIS
Electrical sparks flying from divine creator to man - think Michelangelo’s Creation or The South Bank Show - are central to the whizzy, modernised version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by theatre company imitating the dog. Charges of electricity are dispelled across screens large and small and projected across the walls, the stage filled with the sound of the discharge of volts bursting through the musical soundtrack, man overcoming the divine.
Imitating the dog, making its debut at the Playhouse, in a co-production with Leeds Playhouse, animate Victor Frankenstein’s story by fusing it with the narrative of an unnamed young couple who find out the young woman is pregnant. Scenes alternate between the couple’s bedroom in a flat above a street continually filled with the sound of traffic and the icy wastes where Captain Walton encounters a dying Frankenstein and his vengeful monster, the overturned bed and some drapes magically becoming icebergs.
In a change of style, the three artistic directors, Pete Brooks, Andrew Quick and Simon Wainwright, focus on movement and choreography rather than employing live cameras.
Georgia-Mae Myers and Nedum Okonyia, giving committed performances, play the couple, and Frankenstein and his monster. Okonyia’s rippling muscles are used to good effect to hoist Myers above him, sometimes performing a handstand, so that the combined figure appears scarily outsized and deformed.
The monster’s mismatched body parts are wonderfully suggested when the couple stands in front of each other, his larger hand seemingly attached to her arm. Despite the continuous presence of Wainwright’s incredibly evocative digital images, this is a production that maintains a bodily physicality that’s thrilling.
The couple’s fears over bringing a new life into a dangerous world are heightened by their daily observation of a homeless person on the streets below them and the police patrols chasing him off.
The pulsing red heart within a capsule carried by the monster, a screen containing the image of an arm, and screens of a foetus growing, meld Frankenstein’s re-animation with the couple’s healthy fertility.
A bad science tragedy for Frankenstein is trumped by the couple’s decision to make life happen.
Astonishing.
