Transcription
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to this very special platform conversation with playwright Nick Deere and director Danny Boyle, who together have created the National Theatre's new version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. This story was born in 1816, first published in 1818, and it continues to resonate nearly 200 years later.
Nick and Danny first had the idea for this play way back in the early 1990s, about 20 years ago, when they were working together at Stratford for the RSC on an adaptation of The Last Days of Don Juan. Since then, Danny Boyle has had a very successful 15-year career making films, including Slumdog Millionaire, Trainspotting, and 127 Hours. Nick Deere has written numerous plays, adaptations, and screenplays for stage and screen, including adaptations of Henry James, Jane Austen, and, most relevantly, Lord Byron.
This production marks Danny Boyle's return to his theatrical roots. He has joked that his film work has been a 15-year distraction from his first love. The success of Frankenstein as a play over the last couple of weeks, with both critics and the public, has been quite astonishing, matched only in impact by the Boris Karloff film of 1931. Although there have been countless adaptations of Frankenstein before—on stage, on screen, in novels, stories, and poems—somehow tonight's two speakers have managed to do an extremely difficult thing: breathe life into seemingly dead tissue and liberate Frankenstein from the long shadow of Boris Karloff.
We'll be discussing all of this for about half an hour, and then I'll hand it over to you, the audience, to ask any questions you might have. But can I start with Nick?
Let's go back to the early 1990s when you first had the idea of adapting Frankenstein. Why did you want to adapt it? I mean, there have been over 100 films and many stage versions. Why do another adaptation of Frankenstein?
Well, I had never seen a stage version. I know there have been some, but there haven't been that many in my adult lifetime, that's for sure. I had certainly seen the famous films, and what struck me when I read the book again— for some unknown reason—was that there was a great central dynamic in the middle of the book, which was the creature's story, that was never told in the films. In most of the films, the creature doesn't have a voice; he gets to grunt a bit and do bad things.
Actually, Mary Shelley's book is a novel of ideas. It stems very much from the French Revolution, the radical philosophy and politics of the day. I thought it was a missed opportunity in the movies that I had never seen what I thought was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein properly done.
So, Danny, can you remember those early discussions when you first concocted the idea?
Yeah, I think the first few goals Nick had at it followed the convention of the novel, which is described in a series of letters. It was clear that wasn't working, and then Nick came up with this extraordinary key that unlocked it, really. It seems so obvious, but the story had never been told from the point of view of the creature.
That creates this wonderful dynamic at the beginning of the play, where you do not participate through the eyes of the scientist—be he mad or not—however Hollywood or myth tries to portray him. Instead, you see it from the creature's point of view, which creates a wonderful empathy, allowing you to sense what it's like to be born.
It unlocked so many things, not least for us as parents, because we were both parents and becoming further parents, if that's the right expression. We were having more and more children, and that's why it took so long. We had to wait until they grew up, really, until we were able to present it. Now they come along and watch it, and it's wonderful to think about. For us, it's a bit sentimental, actually, because to think about how they've grown up in the time it took us to get it on stage is quite moving.
It's interesting; of the great horror stories of the 19th century, Frankenstein is the only one where the creature gets a voice. Dracula doesn't have a voice, Mr. Hyde doesn't have a voice, and in M.R. James's ghost stories, the ghosts never have a voice. It's always people describing something, projecting onto them, rather than the thing actually having its own point of view.
The experiment is chatting with the scientist, so it's unique in that respect. But nobody's ever really exploited that before. The central volume of Mary Shelley gives it to us on a plate. The central 40 pages or so of the book is the creature telling us his story—what happened in his life, how he arrived at this position.
So, I've done nothing really but serve back up the volley that Mary Shelley knocked over the net. But seriously, why did it take so long to adapt?
I'm really slow, and they don't pay me very much. Twenty years is quite something—lots of drafts, lots and lots. In the meantime, Kenneth Branagh's film came out about four years after you first had the idea.
We shelved it at that point, actually, for about 10 years. It's interesting because, as you said in the introduction, the movies have kind of stolen it and overshadowed the book. I think that's one of the wonderful things that theater can do. Because it is about the spoken word and about actors, they can grab that back again through Nick. They can get that central conceit back again, which is clearly important to her.
She was clearly writing about the men in her life. It is a book that really doesn't feature a seriously important female creature. It's these men discussing giving birth to life, really. Clearly, that's her way. It's an extraordinary piece of writing on her behalf that she manages to encapsulate the three guys: her husband, eventual husband Shelley, her lover and eventual husband Godwin, her father, and Byron, the accomplice and the famous knight.
For so much of her life with Shelley, she manages to write about them through this and write about the themes of overweening ambition and loneliness.
I remember Nick tried that a couple of times, and you could feel that it didn't work. It was imposing something on it that she chose to write in a different way, which is just about them. Then you would make your own judgments about them from that.
You get a bit of that in the play in the discussions with Elizabeth about a motherless child, but it's not in the novel. A lot of adaptations of Frankenstein have actually shoehorned in Mary Shelley herself as a substitute for Elizabeth because Mary Shelley is fascinating and very modern in many of her opinions, whereas Elizabeth, the fiancée in the novel, is a very flat character.
We had to work pretty hard to give her any kind of uplift, if that's a word I can use in the circumstances. There are so many ideas in it. One thing I thought was great about your version is that you simultaneously deal with the issue of responsibility. You've got the scientific responsibility to the experiment, but also the father's responsibility to his offspring.
By beginning the play with that moment of, well, almost beginning it—the sort of postpartum moment where he takes one look at his experiment and runs away—actually is where Mary Shelley started when she first told the story.
In a sense, it's coincidence that, as Danny says, we had young children when we started looking at this, and they have now grown up as we've gone through it. That is a coincidence, but possibly one of the reasons we kept coming back to it was that we kept identifying in the novel all these subtextual issues about what it means to be a good parent, what's the right thing for a parent to do, and what happens if the parenting is inappropriate or simply poor.
Those are the things that kept coming back to us, and they have infiltrated our version quite a lot. I mean, there's definitely autobiographical elements in it. She dedicates it to William Godwin, and in fact, in the novel—though not in your adaptation, as it happens—there's a miscarriage of justice where the servant Justine gets hanged for something the creature has done.
My son was doing the book for his GCSEs about five years ago, and he came home and said, "Dad, I've got to write an essay on the Justine subplot. What have you got to say about that?" I said, "Cut it."
But there's a bit of political justice in there about how the law doesn't always get it right, which is very much Godwin's influence. Also, the fact that Mary Shelley had a first baby die, and her second baby, William, wasn't well while she was writing the story. This idea of a motherless child, etc., etc. I mean, clearly, there are autobiographical elements, aren't there, even though they're worn lightly?
The monstrous ego of these men that she was surrounded by is extraordinary. The way she portrays them is fascinating. I was reading that Shelley was so upset because he thought he could change sex at will. In fact, I think with the child you mentioned, the story is that he tried to breastfeed it himself at one point.
She's surrounded by these men of staggering ego who are colliding with the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, which is beginning. The frontiers of knowledge are clearly going to explode, and she writes about them in such a simple way. She finds such a simple way of describing them and creates a story that will outlive all of us. It is the great story and will have a much greater lasting impact than any of their work, I think.
It's true. She seemed to want to compete with the legacy of her parents: Inquiry Concerning Political Justice by William Godwin and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft. Her book is much more famous than either of their two works. She would never have figured that because that was the opposition. That's what she had to compete with.
Danny, I can ask you, having had your 15 years in the film business, why did you want to make a play of it rather than a film?
We did a play at the RSC called The Last Days of Don Juan, which Nick adapted from the original manifestation of the Don Juan myth in Western literature. It's by a Spanish monk, Tirso de Molina. Nick does these things he calls adaptations. Sometimes you call them adaptations, and he sort of slips inside the play and honors it but isn't slavish.
It's wonderful, actually, because he makes it accessible and precious for a modern audience. We had a wonderful time doing it, and we always wanted to follow it up. We started work, and as you said, the big movie of Frankenstein kind of scared everybody away from it, really. So we went away from it.
But I thought it was a wonderful way to use theater again. I'd always wanted to come back to the theater; it's where I learned everything I know. One of the big advantages theater gives you is actors. The prospect, when Nick Hytner offered it, of doing this play on this extraordinary stage—which is just about actors—was irresistible.
It was very nerve-wracking, of course, because I felt very rusty. You learn a slightly different set of skills with film. I found myself going for the close-up. I did this very weird thing where, when they were acting in rehearsals, I would move towards them, which is, of course, what the camera does. As soon as you see a good bit of acting, the camera moves in.
I'd find myself walking into the space with them, and of course, Nick would say, "No, you have to sit down; you have to go over there." I'd go back again, and of course, it's because in the theater, the actor becomes the camera for you. They take the camera to you because you have to stay still as well.
Nick said, "You have to stay still because each member of your audience will have to as well." I think it's possible in theater to have a close-up by combining the technical facility we have with lighting and how you use an actor and what an actor says.
Benedict or Johnny can stand here, and every person in the theater is looking at their face as if it were 40 feet high on a screen. The effect is actually the same. You can achieve a theatrical close-up.
The other thing about it is that it makes it a human scale, actually, in a way. Putting it on the stage, more than you can in film, makes it real human beings.
Yes, it's ironic, given that I spent so long in the film industry, that you can use the theater to shrug off the terrible. You very modestly said in one of the articles about Frankenstein that you think theater is more of an actor's and writer's medium, while film is more of a director's medium.
Totally. It's completely true.
That's very modest of you.
No, it's not; it's the truth. You have this, and I remembered it actually when it happened again on this. I remembered it very vividly from working in the theater before, which is that you are intensely important to the actors throughout rehearsal. Then, as soon as they get in front of an audience, it doesn't matter how much they like you; they kind of just push you away.
Every time you give them a note, they say, "That's interesting," with respect. The dynamic is that sense of communication. When you have storytellers like Johnny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch, who are the most amazing natural storytellers, and you find their connection with a storyteller like Nick inhabiting a play like Frankenstein, as a director, you're fortunate to be associated with it.
You can show off with a couple of bits, but basically, that dynamic is what it's about. It's about the actors being here. This space particularly is true for it.
Was it your idea that they should alternate the parts of the scientist and the creature?
Yes, it was, actually. When I was a kid, I had this teacher at school who took us to Stratford to the RSC, and we saw Richard II there, which was shared between Richard II and Bolingbroke, one of the other key players.
That production did that with Richard Pasco and Ian Richardson. It stopped in my mind, and of course, this is the absolute case for it. There are not that many plays you can do it with, but here you can share it.
Are you saying something about the creature and the scientist being two sides of the same coin?
Yes, I had always thought that the book had a lot of elements of a doppelgänger story in it. It is a story about his alter ego. Victor, the scientist, does attempt—when he comes to try and build a man—to build one in his own image.
In the novel, he has to make it bigger than life size because he hasn't got the instruments to work in microsurgery. I think he is a narcissist, quite clearly. When he tries to build something, he tries to build something as much like himself as possible.
What happened in rehearsal was that the two guys ended up coming; they were both there all the time. It was an enormous learning experience for them because one character or the other is in every scene of the play.
So they attended each other's rehearsals?
Yes, they were a bit cautious at first; they didn't know each other when we started, did they?
Not really, no. Within a few days, though, they were both there all the time, sitting and watching each other.
If you can say that an actor developing a character in rehearsal is a bit like a child growing up into an adult, well, they sort of grew up together. They learned in the same way as they went along.
You'd have to ask them whether it makes any difference to actually playing it, but certainly in terms of preparing it, it gives a strange link between the two. They sort of bonded, like two sides of or mirror images of one another.
We've been very fortunate because you can imagine in other scenarios with other actors, it might be an absolute nightmare. But they have built on each other, borrowed from each other, and inspired each other at different times as well.
It's interesting, of course, because it's set at a time when science—this is one of the things we want to emphasize with the production—is where science gives man the right to confront his creator, who he has naturally taken for granted before.
Now he can create life himself; he no longer has to be in darkness. He can create his own light, and therefore he can become the equal—or apparently the equal—of his creator. That's what's wonderful about her story, about the myth of bringing dead flesh to life. You become the creator.
So to bond them together equally in all ways is a wonderful dynamic for theater.
Nick, I was going to ask you. You’ve said that you think of Frankenstein as a novel of ideas rather than a spooky story, and it's absolutely full of ideas.
Mary Shelley was aged 16, 17, 18 when she was writing it, not quite digesting her sources sometimes. There are Humphrey Davy's lectures on chemistry, the vitalism debate, Rousseau's Emile, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft. It's absolutely crammed with references to The Ancient Mariner, Milton's Paradise Lost, Goethe.
She's like a very bright postgraduate student, not quite digesting the sources. How did you manage to convey that in the play?
You brilliantly, particularly in the De Lacey sequences, put that over—that this is about ideas. The creature is learning about emotions, but he's also learning his way around Plutarch and Milton.
Everyone's been terrified of that because it looks lean. I mean, you know, someone's learning a seminar on Paradise Lost is not going to be much fun, but you confront that head-on, and I think that's a major achievement, actually.
Thank you. I thought I was attempting to do The Seven Ages of Man in four ages. In the novel, the creature is wandering in the woods and finds a leather satchel with three books in it: Plutarch, Goethe, and Rousseau. He reads them, and suddenly he becomes an educated, rational, enlightened being. He can't stop talking once he gets the hang of it.
But yes, there is a sense in which Mary Shelley is a bit like a hyperactive six-year-old who has to read absolutely everything. If one stopped and tried to put all that into a stage play, first of all, it would go on for a very long time, and secondly, it would be very, very turgid.
We always knew that we wanted to do something fairly crisp and sweet. Those of you who are coming to see it tonight will be out by half past nine; you'll be in the bar.
We never wanted to do what I refer to as the Deenan Epic version. There are some very good Deenan epic plays that have been done in the past, but they do tend to go on for three and a half hours, and I didn't think this one should be that.
I thought the central dynamic was simply the creature and his creator, and that would support a short and sweet play rather than a long, drawn-out process.
You cut out one of the most famous lines in the novel. One of the most famous lines in the novel is the creature saying in his sepulchral voice, "I will be with you on your wedding night," when they're in the oars and the abortion's gone wrong.
I was waiting for that line. Instead, you say, "You may expect me again." Why do that?
Well, "I'll be with you on your wedding night" was in early drafts, and every time it came up, Danny kind of went like that.
That's a bit of a giveaway when he does that. The problem with it was that it announced to our audience exactly what was going to happen in the next scene but one. If you know there's going to be a wedding—the wedding's been postponed, and we haven't heard anything about a wedding—if the creature says, "I will be with you on your wedding night," then you might as well all go and have a cup of tea for 10 minutes.
Once they do something else, that's the only thing you're going to wait for: the creature to be there on his wedding night. So we wanted to give a line that suggested he wasn't going to go away and leave everybody alone to live happily ever after.
This is unlikely, but we didn't want to tell the audience exactly when they could expect to see him again.
That's interesting. So it's sort of stagecraft rather than giving the game away.
Yes, stagecraft comes into things like this in a lot of ways. Sometimes there's a bit of dialogue solely there to cover the fact that the actor's got to get changed into a different costume and has exactly 14 seconds to do it.
On that subject, the time scale in the play is very clear. From the moment of birth to the end is a three-year cycle. He spends a year with the De Laceys, you get the four seasons, and all the rest of it.
I've never understood why his scars don't get better. In no adaptation of Frankenstein do this; they always look as though he's just got off the slab. Surely he should be looking quite normal by the end, shouldn't he?
That's one of the problems with inviting experts into the rehearsal room, for instance, because they always point out things like that.
Well, no, there is a very good reason, actually, which Nick covered. It's very important in the play that it's progressive. He has learned, and indeed he is adamant that he will not make another one like that because it was clearly not a botch job, but it was like the prototype.
One of the things that astonishes the creature is how much more improved the female is. Clearly, her stitching would heal and look a lot better.
But it's interesting.
Yes, very good.
Can I just add, there's a little bit in the novel that I've never quite understood. I want to read you something.
This is the young Frankenstein, who is a young research student in the novel, taking his first glimpse of the creature.
"His limbs were in proportion, and I'd selected his features as beautiful. Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath. His hair was of a lustrous black and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness. But these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes."
Now, I'm not sure whether the creature isn't supposed to be beautiful. It's a question of the tone of voice you read that passage in. You could say that he's like the Vitruvian man; he's the perfect man. But there's something odd about his eyes—he's dead behind the eyes—and everyone picks up on that, which is why they're scared of him in conversation.
I don't know what to think because, actually, when they have their chat on Mont Blanc, your paraphrase of that is, "You know, it's very good. My God, muscular coordination, hand and eye, excellent tissue, perfect balance. I failed to make it handsome, but I gave it strength and grace."
So you're suggesting it's ugly. Do you see what I mean? I don't know whether it's ugly or not. It's quite hard to make Johnny Lee Miller look ugly, and Benedict Cumberbatch, what do you think?
I don't know how. I mean, he's built like a chip and dale, you know? This guy is big. I don't quite understand why he's eight feet tall. If he's pieces of other human beings, why does he come out as eight feet tall in the novel? I've never understood that.
Indeed, why does he pick up a cloak that fits him? But she wasn't that sort of writer, you know? Her plotting is not of the highest order.
It's interesting because if he was beautiful, then it makes the allegory even more profound because he becomes ugly because people treat him as ugly.
I think in our version, when we get to the end of the story, he has a curious beauty, whichever one of the guys is playing him. By the time we get to the end, he has a stature.
Also, you sympathize with him despite what he does, as you'll see in the play. What he actually does, if you did that in a movie, for instance, which is not as complex a form as theater, you would never be able to rescue sympathy for him—not really.
Whereas in theater, you can. I think that's one of the wonderful things about it. He does acquire a beauty because you attach yourself to his predicaments, really.
One of the things we tried to do is, obviously, we talked about should he be scarred at all. But there are so many simple devices by which people have to react to him that he needs some marking.
The key thing for us, I think, was that he is different, and he is aware of his difference. Nick wrote a wonderful speech in the final scene where he is aware, and he asks his creator—because they're beyond hope, lost in the Arctic together—he simply pleads, "Why can I not be different?"
I think that's a wonderful note to strike in a modern adaptation of it. It says that the creature has to find things that a modern audience will identify with that are not horrific.
The actors have done that; they found a kind of vocabulary that people recognize and see as humane.
Without giving the game away, your ending, Nick, is fantastic. I think it's actually an improvement on Mary Shelley. I really think that because it's an embodiment.
I can't give it away because people are about to go and see it, but it's an embodiment. The whole play leads towards this moment at the end, which it doesn't in the novel.
I think the key to what I've tried to do in the script and what we've jointly tried to put on the stage is to say that we never really saw this as a story about what it means to be a monster. We see it as a story about what it means to be human.
It's actually looking back at us, using the story to look at what we call ourselves sentient beings. What does that mean? What are we really?
All I'm trying to do is say it's a novel of ideas.
It is, and you get these two key scenes: one on the Metagliss in the shadow of Mont Blanc, where he talks directly with his creator about, "I didn't ask to be born," which is a question children sometimes ask when they're in a really bad mood.
Then at the end, where they are in the Arctic, there's nothing left—just the two of them in this wasteland. It's this elemental thing of, "Why did you reject me?" That comes over very strongly, I think.
Can I ask Danny just something before we open it up? In the program, there are some extracts from the director's scrapbook. We've got some pictures: Mark Quinn's head, some scars, a painting by Fuseli, a steam train, and that wonderful painting by Caspar David Friedrich of The Wanderer over the Sea of Clouds.
Did you use visual inspiration as well as the novel and the text by Nick?
Oh, very much. One of the things I always try to do—and it isn't just me; people can contribute to it, actors can contribute to it. If you go around the dressing rooms, they have their own images up to inspire them each night.
You try to create a kind of visual vocabulary for the play as well to inspire people. You didn't mention there's also a picture of two Barcelona players celebrating a goal together, but that was because their heads are kind of almost like they've got one body and they're entwined together.
You look for these sources of visual inspiration everywhere. If you're engaged in the play, you'll find what peaks out of your research is appropriate and organic somehow.
It's not just scattered; you're not doing it for the sake of it. Although you're looking everywhere, the stuff that emerges is appropriate to the play somehow.
You look for inspiration like that, which is both appropriate to the period and also contemporary.
So it's inspiration for the designers, obviously, but also for the actors.
Well, the designers, Mark Tilsley, who designed the set, and Sue at Laab, who did the costumes, will also contribute to it. We're working together now on the Olympics, so we work together on films as well.
You try to create a team approach to it, really. To do a big play like this, as any director will tell you if they're being honest, is a huge team effort.
The thing about lead actors—I mean, great actors, and they are both great actors—genuinely so. I'm not just saying that to big up the production because it's sold out, so it's fine. I could say anything I liked about them, but actually, they're both wonderful actors.
In this sense, it's like film because what happens—and I never really realized this before—is that with a lead actor, they can deliver. They will deliver the play; they will deliver the character. They work on it, it takes time, and they struggle, but they will deliver it.
They deliver something else as well, which is themselves and some aspect of themselves. So they are different, kind of infinitely so, and yet the same, really, because they're Nick's words and it's Mary's story.
There's so much of it locked and fixed and has to be a certain way, and yet there are infinite differences between them as well. That's the expression of their natural personality.
That's what you get in great film acting as well. You know, they often aren't saying lines even; they're just inhabiting something.
So that's what you—and it was wonderful to work on, actually. It was extraordinary. The benefits of seeing two actors work like that were tremendous and something that I don't think we'll ever repeat in our careers.
To have been a part of that is wonderful.
Did they conform to your view of what they might have been like as characters? Did you visualize them in your head and imagine the sort of actor that should play them?
No, we had a very open mind about it. We wanted to go as young as possible because, in the story, as you say, he's like a research student. He shouldn't be older than 30, in my opinion, and these two chaps can just about give us that.
In most of the films, he's sort of 45—the scientist—and you know, some old chap with long sideburns. Those things were important to me, but the actual physicality of the casting is something we did a lot of casting work together.
When we were agreed on what we had, we were delighted. It just becomes part of the process. The process doesn't really have punctuation marks in it; all these years seem to blend into one.
I think the classic example of that is the first three pages of the play, actually, which are absolutely wonderful on the stage. You've got the creature being born, understanding the world around him like an adult baby—sight, sound, touch, feel—and understanding emotions.
It is so brilliant as a piece of mind, and it's two pages of your script, and you describe it completely as we see it. But that must have developed a lot, almost like performance art, while you were working.
I look back at my old drafts; the first page of my first draft hasn't changed in all the years.
It's fantastic.
It's always that, except one thing did change, which was actually a key to a lot of the way we subsequently approached it. I had written that the creature is lying on a table, as in the movies, and one of the first things Danny said was, "I don't want that. I want him upright. I don't want him on the table."
That's what we see in the film. So from page one, we knew we were, in a sense, in opposition to the classical iconography of the movies. We were looking for a new way just to freshen it up, and that started on page one, line four.
It's interesting because Mary Shelley wasn't that sort of writer, I don't think. Films have to be so literal about these things. Her description of the operation scene simply says, "I gathered the instruments of life around me," full stop.
That's it. In the movies, it's like a whole reel of Karloff: AR lights and slabs, and it's alive!
It's sort of taken on a life of its own, the operation scene. You're going back to the fact she didn't care about all that.
It is an allegory, but she can't answer the question: how does he do it? None of us can answer the question. You can put as much science into the story as you want to, but the central question—how do you bring a dead thing back to life?—none of us can answer it.
It's magic. The story at its core is a story about magic and fantasy. I always perceived it as essentially a fairy tale—a fairy tale for grown-ups.
I don't think it's rooted in a world of social realism. The heart of it comes from a very particular period, particularly in science, but it's not really about what it's like to be a peasant living outside in 1818.
Those things were not of great import.
You decided to set it in the period. The Karloff version in '31 has this very strange Hollywood quality of being up to date and in the past at the same time.
It's in a castle; you go up the steps, the laboratory's at the top, but there are cars and 1930s suits. It's this very odd Neverland where you don't quite know whether you're in the present or the past.
You've very specifically set it around 1816, when the thing was first conceived—the Industrial Revolution and all that. Were you ever tempted to mess around with the period?
No, because it seemed to me that to tell the story as I thought properly, it needed to be rooted in the scientific development of that moment. You couldn't escape that; it had to come after the first experiment of, as Danny says, capturing and storing electricity in Leyden jars, which are from the 1770s and 1780s.
They're first doing that, and the very first public steam train ride is in 1830. So it's somewhere between that. That's when technology suddenly explodes, between 1770 and 1830.
It has to be in that little node. Take it out of that, and I think you lose a great deal of the sense of where Mary Shelley is coming from.
It's interesting; she had it on the stage virtually immediately after she wrote it, didn't it? There were productions in 1823.
Yes, and she went to see it when she came back from Italy. She was thrilled it was in the theater, and I think she wrote a letter saying it was delightful.
There's a theme that you have about being unnamed. The creature is unnamed, and she picks that up in her letter about the play. She says, "On the program, it said 'the creature?' for the actor," which is what they did with Karloff as well.
As if there's no name, it just doesn't exist as a person. A lot of the public thought its name was Frankenstein.
There are no pictures; there's certainly no color pictures. There are references to it, but the descriptions of the creature—the way they did the creature—he was blue, like Avatar.
Bizarrely, I read that.
Wow!
But he just grunts. At a very early stage, they took all the words away from the creature, so he just grunts.
The clichés of all the plays have all been published, actually, in America, and I read them all. There were, I think, 12 versions in the 1820s—12 versions—because intellectual property hadn't been invented yet. They could just do it; it was just a free-for-all.
Money from it, exactly.
In all of them, the creature breaks through the French windows, grunts, uses his hand a lot, and there's a comic rustic called Fritz who comes to the front of the stage and tells you what's going on.
He always falls into a volcano!
Actually, you've got the comic rustics in a way.
Only in the...
Tell you, talking about the Karloff fashions, I just came up on the train from Southeast London, and at the end of my road, over the fish and chip shop, is a blue plaque that says, "Born on this site was William Henry Pratt, otherwise known as Boris Karloff."
Presumably, in rehearsal, the play changes and evolves. In fact, we won't say it, but one of the key lines in the film—the most shocking line in the play—actually isn't in the published text.
That's because the text has to go to the printers about a month before the end of rehearsal.
Exactly.
So something happens during that, and the line you're referring to only came into the show about two days before the press night, as it happened.
That's something to look forward to.
I would just say, in response to that question, I try not to envisage anything, really, when I'm writing. I don't know what the actors are going to look like. I rarely write for known actors—very occasionally—but usually, you're just writing something; you don't know who's going to play it.
I certainly try not to think about what it's going to look like because always a designer comes along, and they surprise you. The director and designer get together, and it's not my particular skill.
I don't think I'm going to design the show; I think someone else is going to design it. So all I'm trying to do when I'm rewriting these scenes over and over again is get the dynamic of the scene working properly.
If I can, I don't think about what it looks like, what the costumes would be like, or what the actors would be like. That is actually irrelevant to me when I'm writing.
It becomes relevant when you're in rehearsal, and then, as Danny says, we're all part of a team, actually, and there's a lot of collaboration.
Did you go to the rehearsals?
Oh, sure.
Right, they can't get rid of me!
No, so it's a genuine team effort. I mean, it evolves—the play design was there, the costume design, the lighting designer was in many of the rehearsals, and the music guys, Underworld, came to most of the rehearsals and sat in the corner twiddling.
From my point of view, it's one of the huge differences between theater and film. As I said, as a director, you're a visitor in the theater. The actors own it until it concludes, really.
Then, obviously, Nick will be involved to whatever degree he wants in further productions of it. But in film, you own it, and everybody else visits it, including the writer. That's just the way that film works.
It's a weird divorce that you go through. It's very difficult to walk away from it. It becomes completely obsessional, particularly in this case where, because of the swapping round thing, we had 14 previews and two press nights, so it seemed to go on forever.
Joyful though it was to see them all, as I say, I was in rehearsals most of the time. I started dreaming about it terribly. The worst one was I woke up and said to my wife, "Danny Boyle's decided that all Victor Frankenstein's entrances and exits should be by helicopter, and it's your job to get the helicopter sorted."
I woke up thinking, "Where am I going to get a helicopter?"
So, yeah, walking away, I've spent most of the last couple of weeks lying on the couch, to be quite honest. It takes a lot out of you, really, since you've lived with it for 20 years, in a way.
Off and on, it keeps coming back to life.
Yeah, well, there you are.
I'd like to finish, if I might, with a couple of quotes: one from you, Nick, and one from Mary Shelley.
Nick said the other day, "My hope is that if Mary Shelley popped into the Royal George of the Stalls, she'd recognize what she wrote," which is very nice, and I'm sure that she would.
But also, Mary Shelley herself, at the end of the preface to the 1831 edition of the novel, which was the sort of cut-down popular edition, said, "And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper," which is exactly what it's done.
Thank you very much, Nick. Thank you very much, Danny. Thank you.