David Catlin’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a haunting, highly-theatrical reimagining that intertwines the creation of the famous Gothic novel with the real-life tragedies of its author. The play takes place during the infamous rainy summer of 1816 at Switzerland’s Villa Diodati. Here, a young Mary Shelley, her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Claire Clairmont, and Dr. John Polidori pass the time by challenging each other to create a ghost story.
As Mary begins to spin her tale, the boundaries between reality and fiction quickly dissolve. The friends in the villa seamlessly transition into the characters of Mary’s imagination. Her deepest real-world anxieties—specifically her overwhelming grief over her mother’s death and the tragic loss of her own premature infant—directly birth the monster of her creative tale.
Mary’s story follows Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant student consumed by a desire to conquer death. He pieces together a human form from graveyard corpses and successfully animates it. However, horrified by the hideousness of his creation, Victor immediately abandons it. The Creature, thrust into a cruel world with the mind of a newborn but the body of a giant, wanders the countryside. Though he learns language and experiences human emotion, he faces universal rejection and violence from everyone he meets.
Driven by profound loneliness, the Creature confronts Victor. He demands that his creator fashion him a female companion, promising to disappear forever if Victor complies. Victor reluctantly agrees but, paralyzed by the moral implications, destroys the female creature before she is finished. Enraged by this ultimate betrayal, the Creature vows to destroy everything Victor loves.
The story spirals into a brutal cycle of revenge, claiming the lives of Victor’s younger brother, his friend, and eventually his bride, Elizabeth, on their wedding night. The tragic parallel mirrors Mary Shelley’s own life, where the pursuit of creation is intrinsically linked to profound loss. Ultimately, creator and monster are locked in an eternal cat-and-mouse chase, fleeing across the globe to the frozen, barren wasteland of the Arctic. There, both the creator and the created face their inevitable, tragic undoing in a visually striking, poetic climax.
