“Do not go to see the Monstrous Drama, founded on the improper work called FRANKENSTEIN!!! Do not take your wives, do not take your daughters, do not take your families!!!”
Although the latest adaptation of Mary Shelley’s story, scripted by Nick Dear and directed by Danny Boyle, includes nudity and a rape absent from the 1823 staging that prompted this warning, there is little here to shock even the most sensitive of wives and daughters. The Grand Guignol gore that appeared in early drafts of the script has been toned down. One scene even turns into a dance routine like some monstrous hybrid of Oliver! and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
None of this is a bad thing. Some of it is very good. The staging is spectacular, the adaptation largely thoughtful and the monster—played by Jonny Lee Miller on the night I saw the show—is the most inventive and heartfelt I have seen, owing something to Caliban, Charles Laughton’s Hunchback of Notre Dame and even the Elephant Man. Yet this production is far from perfect. There are minor quibbles to be made about occasionally creaky dialogue and supporting performances, but the main problem is the title character.
Benedict Cumberbatch, who played Victor Frankenstein on the night I saw it, did all a versatile, intelligent actor of his calibre could be expected to do with the lines he was given. But about halfway through the production, the penny dropped as to why he seemed to be struggling: Cumberbatch is playing the Mad Scientist.
True, he does not cackle like Gene Wilder or shriek Colin Clive’s line from the classic 1931movie, “Now I know what it feels like to be God!” But that’s part of the problem: not even naked madness motivates this Frankenstein’s egotistical quest, his utter neglect of his doting fiancée, his contempt for the “little men with little lives,” his lack of anguish about his child brother’s murder. From the outset it is clear that he is a stranger to human feeling and has not the slightest interest in developing his knowledge of reanimation for ‘medical research.’ Set against a creature who we see develop from ‘birth’ to a state of savage grace and wisdom, all the time spurned and despised for looking no worse than a person flung through a windscreen, there is never any doubt who is the real monster.
Should scientists feel indignant at this portrayal? I don’t think so. Frankenstein has for so long been the archetype of the mad scientist that another representation as literal as this can’t elaborate on that image. And anyone who thinks that this amoral individual, experimenting in misanthropic solitude for nothing but personal glory, bears any resemblance to modern scientists is already too biased and ignorant to argue with. This Frankenstein is a fairy-tale figure, like the wicked witch or the evil stepmother. The only harm this can do today is in dramatic terms: villains need to be either more complex or more exuberantly depraved to work as central characters. For all its virtues, Nick Dear’s adaptation in the end takes the easier option in making us love the monster. A production that tries to make us feel sympathy for Victor, a useless but confused and struggling father—now that would be an interesting challenge.
Philip Ball’s latest book is ‘Unnatural: the heretical idea of making people.’ He will be speaking about the book at a National Theatre Platform event on 20 April. More details here
Frankenstein at the National Theatre: Return of the mad scientist
March 01, 2011
