✭✭✭✩✩

written and directed by Jonathan Christenson

Catalyst Theatre, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto

April 29-May 29, 2010

The primary reason to see Catalyst Theatre’s Frankenstein is the fantastic production design by Bretta Gerecke.  Her vision completely explodes our notion, inherited from the 1931 James Whale movie, of what this tale should look like.  Here, everything--sets, costumes, wigs--is white and constructed from paper.  The Creature is dressed in a broad-brimmed hat, travelling coat and boots, with only his huge size, hollow eyes, amorphous nose and claw-like hands to betray his otherness.  The design creates the atmosphere of a children’s tale for adults with unsettling suggestions of insane asylum inmates, clowns, mummies and papier-mâché sculptures.  It’s too bad, then, that the irritatingly smug narration Jonathan Christenson provides nearly smothers our interest.

Christenson has rewritten the entire story in rhyming doggerel, spoken or sung to his eerily atmospheric music.  A Chorus narrates the action even when the characters involved are on stage in a way that mocks the events of the story.  Christenson and Gerecke claim in their notes that the production is meant to appeal to the heart not the head, but how can that occur when the Chorus’s framing remarks view the action as a ghastly joke?  Only once are we ever drawn into the story.  That happens when the Creature (George Szilagyi) approaches the blind old man De Lacey (Tim Machin), the only person not to flee from him in fear and whose hand is the first ever to touch him in compassion.  The tears the Creature sheds speak more loudly than anything the inane Chorus says of the abyss of loneliness his creator, Victor Frankenstein (Andrew Kushnir), has bequeathed him.  Christenson has given Frankenstein several songs expressing his own distress, but Christenson’s propensity for “moon-June” rhymes undermines their effectiveness, even with such a passionate advocate as Kushnir.

In general, Christenson and Gerecke are more interested in creating scenes of clever low-budget spectacle and empty theatricality than in exploring the emotional or intellectual issues that Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel raises.  The parallel between Creature and Creator is the most they can manage.  Andrew Ager’s new 75-minute Frankenstein opera seen here in January this year, delved more deeply into the story’s implications than does Christenson in 2 1/2 hours.  Nevertheless, there is no doubting the intensity of Szilagyi’s and Kushnir’s performances nor the amazing ability of Gerecke to create something daring and new out of miscellaneous bits and pieces--rather like, though in a more benign way, the scientist of the title.

     

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly, 2010-05-10.

Photo: Cast of Frankenstein. ©Marcelo Fiorani.