Reviews 2013
Reviews 2013
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by Adriano Sobretodo Jr., Matthew Thomas Walker & Claire Wynveen, directed by Matthew Thomas Walker
Litmus Theatre, Parlour Room, Saint Luke’s United Church, Toronto
October 23-November 3, 2013
Frankenstein: “I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet”
Litmus Theatre’s new production, Birth of Frankenstein, is a highly ambitious project that tries to relate not only the story of Mary Shelley’s famous 1818 novel but also Shelley’s own story of how she came to write it. It’s not surprising that the company cannot fully accomplish such a feat in only 70 minutes, but what it does accomplish is the staging of numerous scenes of theatrical ingenuity and beauty that explore the theme of what it means in general to create.
The play is set in the Parlour Room of St. Luke’s United Church – a spacious 19th-century-style room with wooden beams, a fireplace and a high ceiling that make it an ideal setting for the 19th-century locations in the play. The lighting that designer Patrick Lavender has created for the room goes far beyond anything I’ve seen before in a site-specific location. Lamps are placed not only outside two of the room’s entrances but inside the fireplace and outside the windows. The low-lying lamps outside the doors cast huge shadows inside the room and the lamps outside the windows will make you think a threatened storm has actually broken.
The play begins with actors Tosha Doiron, Adrian Proszowski and Adriano Sobretodo Jr. holding a seance to raise the spirit of Mary Shelley (Claire Wynveen). Shelley’s notion spoken at the beginning and end of the show is that nothings is created from nothing but from chaos. The corollary is that the novel Frankenstein was created from elements of Shelley’s own life. Shelley therefore begins her story when her mother, the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (Doiron), dies ten days after Shelley was born. From this experience comes Shelley’s wish that the dead could be resurrected since the only way she has to know her mother is through the books she wrote.
Other than this, however, it is unclear what her father, philosopher William Godwin (Proszowski), or her dead mother’s writings have to do with Frankenstein. We learn nothing of the nature of Godwin’s philosophy – anarchism – and what Shelley quotes from Wollstonecraft only has to do with men’s patronizing attitudes towards women. There is nothing about Shelley’s stepmother, Mary Jane Clairmont, whom she detested, even though Clairmont’s daughter Jane (Doiron), Shelley’s stepsister, is a character. Godwin appears mostly as a man who encourages Shelley to read and learn which provides a contrast from Shelley’s daydream of chivalric romances.
Soon peace in the Godwin household is interrupted by the arrival of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (Sobretodo), who pursues Jane although he claims he is really in love with Mary Shelley. Percy Shelley is the one who encourages Mary Shelley to write and compares it to the act of physical creation where one leaves part of oneself behind to live on after one’s death. Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave is the meeting place for their trysts and Mary Shelley soon experiences the vehicle of Percy Shelley’s metaphor about literary creation when she becomes pregnant by him and has a child. Only momentarily does the fact that Percy Shelley is neglecting his pregnant wife Harriet trouble Mary Shelley’s mind.
The Shelleys and Jane travel to Cologny on Lake Geneva to visit Lord Byron (Proszowski), with whom Jane is infatuated. There Byron makes the famous proposal that each of the guests (though not Jane) should write a supernatural story. (Dr. Polidori, one of the guests, whose story became the first vampire story in English is not mentioned.) We then see Mary Shelley’s vision come to life with Percy Shelley morphing into Victor Frankenstein and Byron morphing into the Creature while Jane plays the part of Elizabeth, Frankenstein’s neglected wife.
The title of the show is “Birth of Frankenstein” so it is fitting that the play stops with the Creature’s murder of Elizabeth and goes no further into the novel. What emerges most strongly from the show is not how Mary Shelley’s biography led to her writing of the novel, but rather the parallel between literary and biological creation, specifically how writing is the piecing together of information to make a new object just as Frankenstein’s work is the piecing together parts of human beings to make his Creature. Litmus Theatre’s point of view on the material, however, is contradictory. Despite the parallel of book and Creature, Mary Shelley presents Frankenstein’s production of the Creature as a disaster while Shelley’s own production of her book is seen as a triumph.
The strongest parts of the show comes from its use of wordless, physical theatre. All four performers are marvellously adept at sinuous, flowing movement that verges at times on modern dance. The morphing of Percy Shelley and Byron into their alter egos in Mary Shelley’s mind is unsettling and the telling of the novel’s story in shadows projected on the curtains of a fourposter bed is wonderfully imaginative. The show is immeasurably enhanced by the atmospheric music and engaging piano accompaniment of Mariel Marshall.
While the female performers are more convincing in the dialogue than the males, the dialogue itself often suffers from modern anachronisms that clash with the quotation from works of the period. Would Godwin circa 1800 really have asked his daughter, “Are you OK with that?”
Litmus Theatre is clearly a company bursting with inventive ideas about subject matter and modes of presentation. Birth of Frankenstein is, thankfully, not another horror story but an intellectual mediation on what the work of creation means. If the current project fails to capture all the implications of the topic, it is because the topic is so large. The result is visually and intellectually stimulating nonetheless.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Adriano Sobretodo Jr., Tosha Doiron and Adrian Proszowski. ©2013 Justin Cutler.
For tickets, visit www.litmustheatre.com.
2013-10-25
Birth of Frankenstein