Mary: The Birth of Frankenstein – Auckland Theatre Company, ASB Waterfront Theatre: 21 Aug – 7 Sept
It’s wonderful to attend the first performance of a bold new play exploring mighty themes, delivered with such power one leaves the theatre reeling. Unfortunately, I have to report that Auckland Theatre Company’s new production Mary: The Birth of Frankenstein is not that play.
The play puts several colourful early-nineteenth century literary figures into one shambolic house party. Add a wild and stormy night, a tincture of ghost stories and recreational pharmaceuticals, and a woman devastated by her apparent inability to bring forth life except in prose, and shake dramatically. It’s a recipe, or should be, for great drama.
It doesn’t always succeed. Based loosely on history —and the looser it gets, the more louche the results—the idea demands it be brought to life. The house party itself was the genesis both of vampire stories (John Polidori’s 1825 Vampyr) and Shelley’s Frankenstein, so any dramatist has license to litter the stage with corpses. and delight us with horror.
It’s a play of two halves however. The first is overacted but understated, and could have led somewhere. The second half loses its way entirely, struggling to find an ending and concluding, it seems, with all the options in the pot. It’s a mess.
This is the biggest theatre in the land, so we still expect big results. Actors, play, production, direction, these all demand the stature of this country’s best and best-supported theatre.
The production itself is masterful. Leon Radojkovic’s sound design fits the action like a glove, as it always does. And you can tell he’s had fun. And the choreography of Emily Adam’s Marta, by Ross McCormack—indeed all the movement, from opium dreams to sinister slaying—is stunningly effective, given added menace by Jo Kilgour’s lighting design (although I do think the threat is more effective with lights out).
The cast is written for over-acting, and they deliver. Tom Clarke has Lord Byron’s rakish arrogance with a hint of Tim Michin’s charm and Frank’n’Furter’s strut. Olivia Tennet’s title character has all the confused strength of a strong women trying to piece together her character. Dominic Ona-Ariki does all he can to bring Percy Shelley to life, but is given little help from a script that makes him a cipher. (How on earth can a script turn the author of Ozymandias and Prometheus Unbound into an ordinary Joe.) Lounge Lizard John Polidori (Arlo Green) is both sinister and snippy. Marta herself is a quiet Pirate Jenny character, coming to life, literally, as the centre of the confused centre half, in which zombies (apparently) walk on the Auckland stage for the second time in a row.
And in truth, it’s that second half when problems begin. The curtain closes on the first half with possibilities aplenty. Borrowing heavily from Mary Shelley’s account of the evening, our party probes freedom, free love, atheism, revolution, and pre-Victorian feminism, with some verbal sparring and great dialogue. We’re set for a powerful resolution of it all, we think. Instead it’s all Hammer Horror, in a cartoon lab with bodies animating and re-animating apparently at random. (A companion whispered it’s like the Rocky Horror Show with Vincent Price, but without the great tunes.).
The second half throws away the promising start to plunge us into tropes from b-grade movies. If that’s all the production aspires to that’s fine. I guess. But theatre should surely give us more than a just a good night out. Director Oliver Driver has few other aspirations, it seems, which sells the experience too cheaply.
In the end a cheap thrill doesn’t touch you. Leaves you feeling empty. I’m reminded of Aristotle’s dictum that of primary importance to the drama are plot and character, with spectacle the lowest rank and least rewarding. We’re given spectacle aplenty here, but without a real theme on which to hang it. The “big idea” is that Mary has created a literary monster, which makes a literal one of herself.
I wonder how the ghost of Mary Shelley would feel about it.
Theatre Peter
More info here.
Tickets here.
Photocredit: Andi Crown
