Mary Shelley was a teenager when she read Milton's Paradise Lost. (I suppose I was too but obviously it was something I slogged through in English Lit with very little enthusiasm.) Mary Shelley was also a teenager when she wrote her masterpiece, Frankenstein. Nineteen years old.That is something a little harder to imagine because I was still writing bad poetry about love and other subjects I knew nothing about at that age.
This week I went to see a filmed version of the London stage play, Frankenstein, directed by Danny Boyle and starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller. It was done in 2011 just as Benedict was about to become Sherlock on BBC, and Jonny a year later, would become Sherlock Holmes on CBS version, "Elementary".
It's no secret that Benedict Cumberbatch is my favorite actor, so my intentions on seeing this film were part fangirl and part artistic/intellectual interest. I was pleased to say that I was overwhelmingly impressed. So much so that I am returning tonight to see the same play with the lead roles reversed. Benedict as the Creature was a desperate, clumsy, drooling misfit, emotionally distraught, struggling to adapt, and yearning for love. He based his movements on people who had been damaged by stroke or struggling to walk after a severe injury. It will be interesting to compare Jonny Lee Miller in the same role.
Each actor learned both roles, that of The Creature, and of Dr. Frankenstein, then reversed the roles selectively. The Creature is obviously the more taxing role, physically and mentally. In London it was never announced who was playing what role so it was a gamble as to who you got to see flailing around naked on the stage for the first ten minutes of the play. (The filmed version had the Creature discreetly dressed in a loincloth, probably to spare the actors' male parts from being posted all over the internet.)
As a dancer I was entranced by the first ten minutes. A strange barren set appears with a drum-like womb and a hand pressed against it from the inside like a baby about to be born.
The Creature emerges from an opening in the fabric and literally flounders helpless for minutes on end before staggering to walk. He flops in grass and chews on it like a goat, he revels in the sunlight and the rain. This is all performed like a strange and alien modern dance to a dissonant soundtrack. No words, no back story or explanation. He is alone. Until he finds his creator who reacts in horror and repulsion. His creator rejects the thing he has created because it is too hideous.
An image of Jonny in the role.
So begins the inexorable tragedy of the story. The Creature, abused and neglected, believes himself a monster, cut off from his father figure and shunned as an outcast by humans. Though taught to think and read by a kindly blind man, (including being able to recite from Milton's Paradise Lost) he is once again rejected and driven away by the man's terrified family, and so turns to murder and revenge. He becomes the Monster.
But the play also asks who the real monster is. Dr. Frankenstein comes across as a man detached from his feelings. He is engaged to Elizabeth but ignores her and repeatedly postpones the wedding. He drives out the Creature with no regard for the consequences then spends his life in fear of its return. Yet when the creature finds him and begs him to create a woman for him, an Eve to his Adam, Frankenstein's ego drives him to replicate his experiment. His Eve turns out to be beautiful, almost perfect.
But then in a shocking scene he destroys his lovely Eve, envisioning a scenario where the creatures might breed, because his own Creature has learned to feel love and passion, and could bring more monsters in the world. This sends the Creature on a path of murderous revenge. A path that causes him to rape and murder Frankenstein's fiance, Elizabeth, after she shows him kindness and compassion, the first he has felt since the blind, old man. His chilling line after she touches him and is not repulsed, "I too have learned to lie", followed by: "I am so deeply sorry, Elizabeth" caused the audience to freeze in horror. But he has set his path. He will kill Frankenstein's love, just as Frankenstein killed his. An eye for an eye.
The book, and play, ask all the grand questions. Who are we? Who created us? Why have they turned us out of Paradise and abandoned us? What is evil? Is it learned or carried within us? It also brings in the ethics of Science. Should we tamper with creation, as we now do with cloning? Do those creations have souls? In the end has the Creature become more human than his creator, capable of deep feelings of love and profound hatred. While Frankenstein, attempting to be God, has turned his back on human feelings and has perverted Nature.
The final scene, where Frankenstein chases the Creature far north into the arctic wasteland, finds them both forever connected and fated to die together in a barren, frozen hell.
