Transcription
[Applause]
Hi everybody, thanks for coming. Are we ready to go?
Okay, thanks for being here. This is the first program for the fall semester, part of the assembly series. If you don't know what that is, it's the university's premier series. So welcome!
If you'd like to know about the other ten programs we have going on through mid-November, we have plenty of schedules in the back. We also have Frankenstein bookmarks and other materials. The Washington University safety and security department has lots of information back there, especially for students about where to go in an emergency. So, if you're a student or a parent of a student, check that out.
Just very quickly, I want to mention that we don't have anything official after this event, but the three participants will stick around. So if you didn't get your question answered or if you just want to say hi, come on up. Nick just got in at 11 o'clock last night. Poor guy, he's a real trooper. He's fine, but a bit jet-lagged.
Anyway, come on up and say hi. Finally, please turn off all electronic devices, and we'll be out in a minute.
[Music]
What’s striking about working on it is that you realize it’s timeless. It will be here long after we’re all gone because it comes into focus depending on different issues, either in a very specific way like genetics or cloning, or in a very general way about what man is capable of and what the repercussions of that are.
In writer Nick Dear's adaptation, the creature, rather than the scientist Victor Frankenstein, is given the central role. The production becomes the creature's story and begins with him being literally born on stage.
[Music]
The idea was to start with the innocence of the child being born. It opened up the whole world because it stretches the idea of the creature being a monster. Now, a monster is something that frightens you; it is out there. By making him a creature, you’re saying he’s just like you. That was the emphasis at the beginning of the production: to see him recognize things like birdsong and rain, the sensations of childhood, which is a wonderful innocence and simplicity at the beginning of such a complicated idea of creating a human being.
By exploring the idea of artificial life, Mary Shelley raised larger questions about our own origins and mankind's place in the universe. I think Mary Shelley was right, almost without realizing it, to create a sort of creation myth for the scientific age. Many creation myths involve a deity, a cosmic power that sets the spark of life in motion, and we humans come to life.
Mary Shelley comes up with a creation myth that doesn’t involve a deity or cosmic power; it solely involves the skills of humankind. That’s why I think it’s so relevant now because God doesn’t play a big part in our rationalization about the world we live in and what we’re going to do with it, and the extent to which we’re destroying it.
Mary Shelley was a highly educated young woman, just 18 or 19, when she wrote it. The book is full of ideas that remain very pertinent to us now.
“Remember, I am your creature; I ought to be your Adam, but I am the fallen angel whom you drove from joy for no misdeed. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.”
Welcome to the question: which one is the monster?
My name is Rebecca Messburger. I'm a professor of Italian in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and director of the Medical Humanities program. Joining me on stage is my wonderful colleague Henry Fay, a professor of drama and comparative literature, who was the chair of the performing arts department for 20 years.
I will introduce our guest of honor in just a moment. Today's common reading program is part of a university-wide celebration of the bicentennial of Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein. There will be numerous events across the campus through the fall of 2018, and I encourage you to check out the Frankenstein Bicentennial website to find out what's coming.
Today's conversation is sponsored by the First Year Center, and we are very grateful to Jill Stratton and her entire team for their invaluable assistance in developing this event, as well as to our campus partners for their wonderful support: the School of Law, the Washington University Political Review, and the assembly series directed by Barbara Ray.
It’s especially wonderful to see so many young faces in the audience, many of whom have just arrived for their first year at Washington University.
I know in the orientation to this novel, you have heard repeatedly that you are the very age of Mary Shelley when, 200 years ago, she wrote the defining creation myth and horror story of the modern age. No pressure!
Students who have successfully channeled their inner Shelley are winners of the common reading program contest, and I would ask these students to rise so we can recognize their terrific work. Thank you!
I’d like to thank all the members of our audience for coming out for what promises to be an electrifying conversation with the acclaimed playwright Nick Dear about the novel and his gorgeous stage adaptation of it.
Nick Dear's interest in theatre began during his undergraduate years at the University of Essex, where he was cast in what he has called a career-defining role: the second murderer in Macbeth. The experience confirmed that he would not pursue a career in acting, but by the end of his undergraduate studies, he had already written his first play.
Mr. Dear's full-time career as a playwright launched with the production of The Art of Success in 1986 at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon. It won international acclaim and was staged two years later in New York City with Tim Curry of Rocky Horror Picture Show fame in the lead role. Notably, the play came here 25 years ago and was performed in our performing arts department.
Since that time, Mr. Dear has written dozens of plays, including his award-winning Big Dark Earth and The Light Sky, as well as numerous celebrated adaptations, including Henry James's The Turn of the Screw and, of course, Frankenstein. He has also written many acclaimed screenplays for television and film, as well as popular radio plays produced for the BBC.
As we saw in the video, his 2011 adaptation of Frankenstein was directed by Danny Boyle and featured Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller at the National Theatre of London, whose simulcast screenings have been seen by millions worldwide, including many of you.
So please join me in welcoming our guest, Nick Dear.
[Applause]
Welcome everyone! I want to begin by raising a question. We’re going to do this in a conversational form, and then at the end, we’ll open the floor for your questions.
I was going to ask Nick about the process of adaptation, but before we do, I think perhaps a prologue is in order in which you might want to address how you came to view this novel.
Well, first of all, it’s a pleasure to be here, a long way from my home in London, England. I’m delighted to find 1746, your first-year intake. I’m reassured that you’ve all read this book from cover to cover, and I’ve had a brief conversation with the competition winners before coming in here. I can tell you that the level of intellect in the room is quite impressive.
It’s a great idea to use this novel as an interdisciplinary basis for your entire first-year intake because one can approach it from so many different angles.
When I first came to it, which was quite a long time ago now, I was very intrigued by who this Mary Shelley was. You know, one had heard of Byron and Shelley, but who is Mary Shelley?
Possibly some of you know her story, but in brief, her mother is Mary Wollstonecraft, often called the mother of feminism, the author of what one would say is the first feminist book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Her father was a radical philosopher, William Godwin. They married a few months before Mary was born, but Mary Wollstonecraft died due to complications in childbirth just 11 days after Mary Shelley was born.
So, Mary Shelley does not know her mother, which I think is quite significant for this novel. Mary grows up in a household that didn’t have much money, but they were at the center of radical debates in London around 1800. When Mary Shelley was 8 years old, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the great Romantic poet, came and read his new poem in her living room. It’s called The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and she hid behind the sofa to listen because she was supposed to be in bed.
That’s the world she grew up in. When she was 16, another figure came into their orbit: the poet Percy Shelley, who was 20. He was already married to Harriet, and they had one child. Shelley was the mad genius poet and a radical reformer trying very hard to change the world. He was running around the British Isles distributing leaflets to workers who didn’t really want to know. Mary thought he was wonderful, and they eloped.
Shelley left his first wife, Harriet, and subsequently two children. Harriet killed herself not long afterward, which has been a blot on Mary’s history ever since. But significantly, they had to get out of the country more than once.
On their second trip abroad, they found themselves visiting Lord Byron on the shores of Lake Geneva. Many of you know the famous story of how they sat around one night—Byron, Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Dr. Polidori—and said, “We should write ghost stories.” The weather was terrible because there had been a volcanic eruption somewhere like Sumatra that year, and they had two years of terrible harvests.
So they were stuck indoors, wondering what to do with themselves. None of them succeeded in completing their ghost stories, except for Mary Shelley, who was just 18 years old. Over the next year or so, she completed Frankenstein, an extraordinary achievement for anyone, but particularly for a woman of that age.
It’s important to understand where it’s coming from; it doesn’t just come out of nowhere. It comes from the background she grew up in, a world where debate and new ideas were encouraged. She and Percy Shelley were fascinated by the new world of science, chemistry, galvanism, and electricity—all these things were just starting.
We know they attended lectures in London on voltaic piles and battery cells. All of this informs Frankenstein.
We will continue to dig into this. I’m going to ask a number of questions, and so will Rebecca, and we will present them to Nick and continue our discussion.
So my first question is this: I can’t help but think there is a rather crude comparison between what Victor Frankenstein does in harvesting dead body parts and finding a way to reanimate them with the job of the playwright—the adaptive playwright cutting Mary Shelley’s early 19th-century text and transforming it, giving it life in the 21st century.
You cut an enormous amount out of the novel, and yet the result is completely convincing. How did you decide what to cut and what to include from the original text?
Well, let me step back slightly and say that, as we all know, there are an awful lot of movies on the subject of Frankenstein. I believe there are around 200, and I’ve seen a number of them. I had never seen, even though I live in London and Brighton, at the center of a theatre culture, a version of Frankenstein on stage that I thought was any good or serious.
There was a gap in the market. One of my reasons for coming to this is as a professional writer: I thought, “No one’s done that; maybe that’s a good idea.”
I began with the notion that for those of you who have read it—meaning everybody under 20—I’m sure many of you know there’s a great central section of the novel, about 45 pages long, in which the creature, as I call him—and indeed as Mary Shelley calls him, she almost never refers to him as the monster—he’s known as the creature, which is a much more humane epithet.
So I decided to use that and called him the creature throughout. He has about 45 pages in which he tells us his story: “This is what happened to me; this is what it was like for me.” Almost the entirety of the adaptations of this novel have been viewed principally from the point of view of the scientist, Victor Frankenstein.
As I’m sure everybody knows, the creature is not called Frankenstein; his creator is called Frankenstein. I thought this was very odd. Why has this happened? You have this great central section of the book that is the creature’s point of view, and we never hear this.
The movies have never addressed it. Kenneth Branagh attempted to a little bit in his rather tragic 1994 outing, but by and large, this has never been done.
So my initial starting point was, “Okay, I’m going to try and tell at least part of the story from the point of view of the creature.” Once you make that decision, a lot of other decisions start to fall into place.
I should say I worked on this for a number of years; it didn’t happen overnight. Some plays come on quite quickly; this one developed very much in collaboration with Danny Boyle, who you saw on the screen. We spent a good few years going back and forth over this, with me drafting it, redrafting it, and redrafting it.
He’d go off and win a few more Oscars and come back, and I’d be sitting at home redrafting the play. Eventually, we did it.
We knew we had to look at the structure with that starting point in mind, which was that we wanted the creature to tell his story.
For example, for those who know the sea captain’s story, which bookends the novel, Captain Walton is going off on a voyage of discovery trying to find a Northwest Passage over the Arctic. He finds the dying Victor Frankenstein on an ice floe, somewhat unbelievably, I should say.
A lot of the narrative devices in this novel are really terrible. I’ve heard it described as the worst great novel ever written. She was 18; a lot of it is just unspeakably bad. But at the heart of it is this incredible story, which to me was ripe for dramatization.
It’s about the conflict between the scientist and his experiment, and the experiment fights back and says, “But you abandoned me.”
That’s just the beginning of how you decide what to cut. If you want to tell the story from the creature’s point of view, which I do, I don’t keep strictly to that rule. About midway through, I have to bring in Victor, but I can’t use the sea captain.
There are other reasons why I didn’t want to tell simply what the creature has to say until I bring in Victor. I want to know something about how Victor came to achieve this extraordinary thing: the creation of life.
When you start to look at it closely and struggle with how to make an adaptation, and when you sit in the rehearsal room with actors, they ask, “How did he do it? What actually happens?”
You plumb the text and go through it with a fine-tooth comb, trying to find out what actually happens. You realize that she can’t tell us what actually happens because she doesn’t know. It’s a fairy tale; it’s not a truthful story in the sense that she can’t tell us, and I can’t tell you how Victor creates life.
I have to give some backstory for Victor, which I did in a scene using the ghost of his little brother William.
Continuing with your focus on the creature, I’m wondering if you would talk about the real sin of Victor Frankenstein. Many people have said that his greatest crime was this unnatural birth. I’m wondering what you think about the notion that it’s the fact that he didn’t nurture what he created and how that figures into Mary Shelley’s understanding of what it means to be human and our need for affiliation.
When we were preparing this play at the National Theatre in London, one of the things that kept coming up in conversation—because we had a long rehearsal period of something like six or seven weeks—was that we were not trying to express what it’s like to be a monster; we were trying to express what it’s like to be human.
What does it really mean to be human? I think Mary Shelley, almost without knowing it, is addressing something fundamental about care and nurture.
But I think there’s another side to it. We can say that the problems begin with Victor’s hubris. Victor is very proud of his ability; he’s portrayed as an extraordinary genius, probably modeled on Percy Shelley, Mary’s husband.
He’s an extraordinary wayward genius with no real social conscience and no real care for those around him in a personal, familial way. A lot of it is about his dereliction of duty when it comes to the care of his offspring.
But it also goes back before that. He makes a decision that he wants to have a child; effectively, he wants to create life. But he doesn’t propose to do it by the normal route, which I won’t have to explain to you because you’ll know what it is.
His wife, the woman who wants to be his wife, Elizabeth, is often made into a sort of Mary Shelley figure in adaptations. I hope to make her a bit feisty, feminist, and adventurous, but she’s not in the book. She’s a bit of a blob.
Her ambitions are entirely bourgeois; she wants to be the wife who sits at home while her husband comes back and sits by the fire with their six children. Victor won’t go there; he wants to create life effectively in a test tube.
There’s an argument, possibly one that’s now somewhat out of date, that the natural order of things has been thrown into chaos by his refusal to go through the normal sexual procreative functions.
So I think it’s a combination of his hubris as a scientist, believing he can do anything, and let’s not forget that his ambition as a scientist is entirely laudable. He wants to eradicate disease; he wants to effectively get rid of death.
He’s saying, “I can improve humankind; I’m that good, and I can do it by building a creature from scratch.” He succeeds in this fairy tale, but one could argue that’s transgressive and not helpful.
If you make a creature, one could also argue that having done this, he then abandons his offspring. You could also argue that the natural order is subverted, and chaos will ensue.
I’m wondering if I could follow up. You chose very young Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller, and what’s striking is how young the Victor Frankenstein is who you’ve represented in your play.
Actually, he’s a very young man in the novel, and it’s often forgotten. The novel is completely explicit; he’s a post-grad student. He should be about 26.
In the end, we had to cast a couple of actors who were a little older; they were in their thirties. But I initially wanted to try and cast actors in their 20s.
In almost all the movies, certainly the old ones, he’s this rather camp gentleman in his fifties with long side whiskers, usually mad and giggling.
This is Mary Shelley. Mary Shelley is proposing two of the brightest minds of his generation. Allen Ginsberg said, “The best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.”
She has her sights on Percy Shelley, her husband, and also on Lord Byron, whom she knows quite well by this time. He was sometimes seen as the model for the creature because he had a deformed leg and behaved like a monster most of the time.
The reason I brought up the age of these young men is that Mary Shelley seems to have a lot to say about education, about good teachers, and about good students.
Victor Frankenstein is a young man just out of college or in the midst of college. I’m just wondering, in the context of Washington University, a top-tier school in the country and the world, what do you think her message is about the limits and aims of knowledge?
I think there’s one thing we should remind ourselves of first, which is that we’re very fortunate, at least in the West, that young ladies can go to college, as Mary Shelley couldn’t. This was not possible; there were no colleges for Mary Shelley.
There was no education for Mary Shelley; there was no education for her mother. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was a reformer trying to run a couple of schools for young ladies, trying to find a place where young women could be educated in something more than embroidery.
But there was no possibility for Mary Shelley to go to college. So she is an autodidact, and her learning in the novel is kind of scattergun; it comes from all over the place.
As I said before, some of our narrative devices are a little wobbly, particularly the one in which the creature finds a satchel that, by pure chance, contains the three texts central to Mary Shelley’s thinking at the time: Plutarch, Milton, and Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther.
It’s a really naïve piece of scriptwriting to suddenly come across a satchel, so I dumped that. I have the blind man, De Lacey, take over as the educator.
One of my ambitions in writing a play of two hours’ length was that I wanted to start with a leading character who was quite literally inarticulate, who could not speak at all, and I wanted to take him through the process of being educated and end with him being the most articulate person on the stage.
I think it’s amazing that in reading the adaptation, you were able to create a kind of verisimilitude about the creature’s acquisition of language. After all, most of us don’t learn sitting outside the De Lacey hovel or whatever it is.
But this creature’s acquisition of knowledge, of course, feels justified and feels somehow possible. I also love the device where, when he leaves the creature alone, Victor throws his cloak over him, and that cloak furnishes him in the next scene.
It’s also where I think he finds the notebook, and those things seem very plausible, even though they’re obviously theatrical devices.
My next question is about the question of corruption of innocence in the book. To what extent did you begin thinking of the creature as a being who is born, as we all are, as a child, as a blank slate?
His purity, his desire to learn, which is cultivated in the De Lacey scene, is then squandered by what he experiences through society and through understanding the origins of his birth.
I think it’s valuable to remember what I started off with, which is the world she’s coming from. This sudden outburst of radical debate came immediately after the French Revolution.
To most people in England, the French Revolution was a diabolical outrage. To a small handful of free thinkers, it was the best thing that ever happened anywhere because suddenly all the old certainties were up for grabs.
In the space of 30 or 40 years, all the precepts of Christianity were being questioned. Godwin, Mary’s father, was saying, “Is marriage a good thing? No, I don’t think it is.”
“Is the church predictive? It is.” “Should we have a monarchy? Not only should we, but it’s all being questioned.”
One of the most significant questions raised at that point is around the idea of original sin, a Christian precept that we are born essentially evil.
Rousseau comes along shortly before the French Revolution, challenging this notion. He says, “No, man is born free.”
I think Mary takes on this notion very deliberately, and I think it runs right through the book. There’s no question that the book ends up saying evil is a product of social conditions.
One could argue that’s almost Marxist in its modernity. It’s certainly not a standard way of thinking about evil in the late 18th century.
I think she was, I don’t think she knew what she was doing in one sense. Many commentators have said this about this book.
Her later books are nothing like as interesting. They are interesting, but only relevant to scholars of early feminist literature; they’re not great.
It’s almost like she doesn’t know what she’s doing. It’s all coming out of this bubbling undercurrent of crazy ideas that explode out of her over a year of writing this book.
One of them is, “What if we’re actually born perfect and corrupted by society?” At that time, that was a very radical idea.
I think you’re absolutely right about the fact that she sets it in Geneva, which is a center of Calvinism and the refuge of Rousseau. It seems as though those two things are at war in her novel, and there’s a deliberateness in setting it in that city.
So I think you’re agreeing.
Maybe we could talk a little bit about the critique of the Enlightenment that is going on. I was wondering if you could talk a little about the poetics of darkness and light in your play, which is so exquisitely represented in that birth scene we saw a tiny snippet of in the video.
In that scene, the creature is being borne to the electrical jolts that are lighting up the stage, but then we realize that it’s actually his blinking eyes opening.
Throughout the entire play, we have this contest between darkness and light: dark spaces of the laboratory, the dark moments, the dark agents, and light agents as well.
I’m wondering if this is connected to philosophical questions. I’m an Enlightenment scholar, so I’m thinking about her critique of Enlightenment science.
Galvanism itself—what does Victor say? “I brought torrents of light to a darkening world.” That’s a line that’s in my play, which is actually in the book.
The significance of the opening moments of the play that I wrote is that the stage goes dark, then it gets light, and it goes dark again. You realize this as the creature is opening.
We see him being born; we see a baby being born, though he’s a full-sized man from within.
It’s not a sin to add that when Rebecca says there are electrical sparks, I’m not talking about lightning bolts or anything like that.
What’s going on is something which is not represented on the stage but is hinted at, which is much more scientific and genuinely rooted in the science of the day.
What it does, though, is it immediately says to the audience, and this is just pure dramaturgy, that we’re seeing things from his point of view.
If the stage goes dark when the creature shuts his eyes, and then it comes light again, we are inside his head.
From the very beginning of my version of the story, which is an attempt to do the greatest justice I can to Mary Shelley’s extraordinary book, we are with the creature.
As for other shades of dark and light, it’s no coincidence that Mary Shelley references Milton’s Paradise Lost quite a lot in the novel.
I have pulled that out, extracted it, and made it a real central motif for my creature. He’s learned Paradise Lost off by heart.
The biblical story that Milton takes us through is shot through with ideas of celestial light and terrible darkness.
But to try to answer your question properly, I didn’t actually see what I was doing as commenting in any way on the philosophy of the Enlightenment.
I’m thinking much more about staging and what the story is doing in terms of drama.
But it’s all linked, and I wouldn’t say I ever approached it that way.
It does come through this contest and the relationship to her struggle with these philosophical concepts and the new science she’s confronted with.
I did want to ask you about the relevance of her work for our contemporary understanding of science and humanity.
I’m glad you said “and humanity” because I think it goes beyond just an understanding of science.
I’m not a scientist, and I used the word “scientist” in the very last line of my play very deliberately because the word did not come into use until 1834.
It’s the first time we have the word “scientist” in a publication, so it’s almost 20 years after the book was written.
The book has often been described as a handbook of radical philosophy. One of the reasons I came to it is that I had never seen in all the movies and some plays I’d seen anyone attempt to lay out in front of us all the ideas that were bubbling out of Mary Shelley.
I can’t answer the question of why it has such relevance to so many people. I can only tell you that since we put this play on at the National Theatre in London nearly six years ago, there have been different productions of it in places as far apart as Latvia, South Korea, Japan, Canada, Hungary, and Poland.
There’s something about the story that seems to have a very broad appeal. If I could bottle it, I’d be very rich, but I don’t know what it is.
As we say in theatre, if anyone knew the secret to making a hit play, we’d all write hit plays all the time, but we don’t.
So something in this story has a real reach across cultures and across the world. It’s remarkable that we’re sitting here, 200 years after she published it, still wishing to talk about it.
I have another question, which is more theatrical, a dramaturgical one.
Having made the decision to foreground the creature, that the creature is virtually our hero in this story, there’s still the necessity of creating some sort of aesthetic balance between the creature’s aspirations and Victor’s.
The creature does some horrific things despite this idea of essential innocence.
I marveled at the way you achieved a kind of balance between these two figures, something that is perhaps mirrored by the fact that, as Rebecca pointed out, the two actors at the National alternated in performance.
One night, one would play Victor, and the next night, the creature.
Even though Victor is seen as basically a hollow, sexless intellectual, I think a good production of this play allows us to feel something for him at the end.
This extraordinary psychological balance must have been extremely difficult, especially given where you were coming from with the story.
I’m not sure if that’s a great question, but I’d like you to speak to what I’m trying to articulate here.
A lot of decisions you take when making a piece of theatre are based on very practical reasoning.
When we decided that the actors were going to alternate the parts, it became imperative that the part of Victor had to be as good—one hopes—as the part of the creature.
Otherwise, no one’s going to want to play the second part; they’ll just say, “I want to play the good part.”
The second part, Victor, I call the second because he comes into the story second. He’s like running to catch up.
We’ve had an hour, perhaps, of the creature being creature-ish and eventually violent and horrible because he’s decided he’s going to wreak revenge.
He says, “I sweep to my revenge,” and my version, which is actually a line from Hamlet, he becomes...
[Music]
Victor has to find some kind of psychological depth, as you suggest.
I found it by looking at the story from a particular point of view, which I have personal experience with: autism.
For those of you who know anything about it, I have autism in my family, and this was in part a driving factor in wanting to write this play.
It began with seeing the creature as exhibiting many traits of autism. For those who know something about it, you want to join in, but you keep getting it wrong, and people don’t like you.
Then you get cross, and then you get violent and destructive, but you still want to join in, and you keep trying, but you keep getting it wrong, and they throw stones at you again.
I began with that idea of leading to destructive violence through not being assimilated and not being accepted.
But I also started to think about Victor’s psychology because, let’s not forget, we’re talking about a kind of doppelganger effect. They are a mirror image of each other.
Victor is clearly a narcissist, as one of our very bright students said earlier on, having read it.
Victor’s narcissism leads him to try to play at God. He wants to play at God, and what does God do? God builds man in his own image.
I genuinely believe that what Mary Shelley is suggesting is that Victor thinks he’s so wonderful and perfect that he’s trying to make another one of him.
But he simply hasn’t got the technical ability yet, and it comes out a bit monster-ish when he gets a second go at it and builds a female.
What I decided to do in the latter part of my play, which isn’t already in the book at all, is to suggest that the creature actually understands love and what it might mean to be in love in a way that Victor can’t and doesn’t.
Victor is, as Henry said, sexless. Yes, he is, but you could argue that there’s his great friend in the novel, Clerval.
You can make a strong case for saying that Victor feels homosexual love for Clerval, which is why he doesn’t want to sleep with his wife.
I decided to leave that out of my version of the story because I thought it slightly confused what I was trying to do.
You can make a strong case for saying that Victor’s in love with Clerval.
I think that in what happens at the end—excuse me for going on, but very quickly—it was incredibly hard to end this story as a staged version.
In the book, Walton finds Victor dying on an ice floe, takes him on a ship, and Victor dies. Then the creature comes along, and Walton goes, “Oh, it’s true; there really was a monster.”
Oh my God! The monster goes off, and we don’t really know, but it looks as if he set his own funeral pyre on an ice floe and probably burned himself to death.
We don’t know; we’re not told because Mary Shelley has no idea either. She has no idea how to end it.
But it ends with them both being dead, and every time I wrote the final scene dozens of times, it kind of goes flat.
The whole thing suddenly went, “Hmm.” Nobody liked the endings I was coming up with until I decided I got this image in my head of DNA, of the double helix.
It goes on forever; it’s like a dance. One of the things that Watson and Crick, and the woman who worked with him—her name I’ve forgotten—said when they discovered the double helix of DNA was that they thought it was so beautiful.
I wanted to create this sense that they were locked in an unending dance at the end. One would pursue the other, and it would never end.
The scientist, the creator, and his experiment were forever locked in a symbiotic relationship; they couldn’t break out of it.
So I ended up with them not dying but sort of going off in this dance.
And so we’ve come to the end of the play.
That was a perfect moment to ask our audience members to come forward and ask any of their own questions of Nick Dear.
I would ask that we give first consideration to our students, if that would be okay, since they have done all this work reading and thinking and talking about this novel.
Thank you! Come on up.
Don’t be shy; there’s so much to talk about.
[Applause]
Bravo!
You have to endure the walk down.
Representation of the monster has been portrayed in many different ways, and I was wondering how you came up with your version and the reasons behind it.
Thank you; good question.
Did everybody hear the question?
How do we come up with that version of the monster?
There’s something important to say first of all, which the students I was talking to earlier heard. When you come to it on the stage, as opposed to in a movie, you’re actually working with real live actors and actual people.
They tend to be very fit, sexy hunks. They don’t tend to be nine feet high with a bolt through their neck.
Not that we wanted to botch with a neck anyway, but in the theatre, as opposed to in the movies, you’re working on a human scale.
Especially if you’re doing that switch around with the two actors, you’ve got two of them, and you’re working on a double human scale.
But there’s another thing to say: what’s my main purpose here? Is it to try and frighten the audience? No, that’s not my purpose.
I think there are elements in the story that are frightening, possibly not in what is often described as a gothic way.
I have reservations about its actual gothic-ness, but it’s not my purpose.
I think the story is chilling if told properly, but I’m not here to put something on the stage that will terrify an audience.
Mary Shelley, five years after she published the book, comes back from Italy. Percy Shelley has drowned. She goes back with her one remaining child, three of the earlier ones having died, to live with her father in London.
In 1823, one week after being back in England after eight years in Italy, they go to a theatre to watch a play called Presumption, or The Fate of Frankenstein.
Five years after she published it, there were already plays, and I think there were four plays done in London that year.
Of course, there’s no copyright; nobody has to ask permission. She doesn’t get any money from it.
Throughout the 19th century, there were versions of Frankenstein in the London theatre. They were all, as far as I can judge—and I’m not an expert—primarily there to try and scare the audience.
So they wondered a great big scary monster who would terrify the audience. That wasn’t my purpose.
I wanted to see this creature come from, as I say, from an inarticulate babyhood to a highly intellectualized maturity in two hours.
So it’s got to be real. I’m trying to answer your question, believe it or not.
It’s got to be a reality to it; it can’t be.
It’s also a very physical play; they fight, there’s a rape, there are all sorts of physicality.
So that has enormous implications for what you can do with makeup, particularly prosthetic makeup.
Prosthetic makeup has come a long way in the last few years, but particularly in the movies, they can do anything.
They rip arms off and do all that crap they do, you know.
But in this, we’re working in real time, and you’ve got to do it every night. The makeup’s got to stay on until the end of the play, and the actor’s going to be hot and sweaty and under a lot of lights.
The answer to your question is we experimented for months with makeup. We had a team of makeup people making prosthetics.
One thing to be said is Danny Boyle took the two actors off to see an autopsy, and I couldn’t face it.
I thought I’d done my job; I had to sit through an autopsy when they actually took a brain out and all that.
We discussed quite a lot, but although we didn’t know how you impart life to an inanimate form, we did think about, “Well, if you’re going to try and do that, would you really get a leg from here and an arm from there?”
No, you wouldn’t; you’d get a cadaver and try to put organs back into it that worked.
So that means you’re not getting something with one arm and two feet longer than the other; you’re starting, you know, the reality is you just get a body and try to make it go again.
All of these things do impact how you design the monster.
I’ve got at home one of my treasured things on my wall. I asked our designer, so to wrap La Lab, who now teaches design at a university here in the United States—I can’t remember which one, but it’s somewhere in the Northeast.
I’ve got her drawings for the bodice, for the stitching, basically.
If you look at photos of that National Theatre production, it won’t seem particularly horrifying.
That’s for two reasons: one, the practical ones that I’ve been talking about, and secondly, that was never our purpose—to be ghoulish and horrifying.
Good question!
Hi, my name is Yako, and I was really fascinated by that point you made about the myth of creation, especially from the point of view that we usually create this myth to understand the universe and give answers to some deeper philosophical questions.
I was wondering how that plays with the fact that you chose to show us the world from the eyes of something that’s artificial and therefore outside of the natural world.
Is there a link to that?
Yeah, thank you.
I don’t know that I can properly answer that question except to say that I think the fact that it is outside the natural world is what distinguishes this creation myth from others.
Most creation myths, and I’m so not an expert, I would hazard a guess that most creation myths come about over the course of time from a particular belief system in a particular part of the world that has a need for a creation myth of some kind.
Some people need to have 300 gods; some people have a need for one God. They evolve and develop and probably aren’t written or amassed from the sort of 40 books, the Gospels that probably existed, of which we have four.
This one is significantly different in that it is just the invention of a person’s mind.
I’m being very loose and elastic when I call it a creation; clearly, it’s not a myth; it’s a novel, a construct, a piece of fiction written by a young woman.
I think you’re right to identify that it is about something which is outside of humanity, but that’s because it’s not genuine creation at all.
That’s...
I’m Gina, and I guess a more basic question on the title of the lecture: which one do you think is the monster, if there is one?
Yeah, that’s a good question.
I think one of my intentions, which seems to have had some success, was that people would simply ask the question and would end up—my ambition for any play is that the audience goes home arguing about it.
I love it when people get into a bongo: “No, no, no, it’s meant to be this; it’s going to be that.”
I think it’s quite likely that a lot of people would be asking that question having seen my play or read my play: “Which one really is the monster?”
I like its ambivalence; I like it being left open.
If it brings with it some encouragement to look again at Victor Frankenstein, the scientist, from a slightly different perspective and say, “Hang on, do we really buy this guy?”
Are we committed to what he says, or should we be a little more dubious about what he’s up to?
Not necessarily to say that he is a monster, but then again, Mary Shelley doesn’t say that the creature is a monster.
In a sense, both of them are monsters, and neither of them is a monster, and I can have my cake and eat it too.
Well, I think we can now thank...
Hello, hello! My name is Clayton. I’m a resident advisor, so I’ve been a part of a lot of different discussions with some of my residents.
One of the parallels we’ve seen across the board with this piece of fiction is this idea of associating the creature as the “other,” just as a general term.
So one of my inquiries at this point is: how do you, as a playwright, reconcile perhaps the worldview of Mary Shelley of the other, then grieving over the creator in the end?
For example, looking at people who are of other status, a lot of us aren’t necessarily grieving over people who have more social capital or relative power to us.
What do you think that specific ending of the creature, who has been in many ways exiled, exploited, and subjugated, grieving over their master, means in its worldview today?
It’s a hard question, and I think I do understand what you’re saying.
If I understand it right, you’re saying, “Why would he grieve for this guy?” Would that be right?
I think that if this was a story of some kind of social realism, which was actually set in a world that was real, it would be very hard to justify that.
But I don’t think it is a story of social realism. I think it’s a story, as I say, it’s a bit of a fairy tale for grown-ups in one respect.
I think he is grieving at this point because he says all he ever wanted was a father.
Victor has given up on his responsibilities of parenthood, and along with all the other things that are going on in the story, there’s that sense of loss.
I can entirely see that you might argue that somebody who has been presented in the story as a slave, as the downtrodden, as the outsider, would not wish to grieve in reality for the death of their oppressor.
You could put it that way.
I would say to you, though, that if you were mounting a production of my play, you could make that point.
You might choose to completely subvert the lines I’ve written. The creature could be deeply sarcastic at that moment.
You could make it clear to an audience that he’s not really grieving at all.
All those things are available in the theatre. If one chose to do a production of this play, it doesn’t have to all be at face value, as it were.
I don’t think there’s any reason why one should necessarily believe what the creature is saying at that point.
I think, from my point of view, it’s to do with he just wanted his father to love him.
Well, it didn’t love him, but you could see it as a master-slave dynamic, and that would be a very different way of looking at it.
Listen, it’s an excellent question. I can’t really begin to get under the surface of it right here and now, but good thought!
Hello, my name is Parma, and my question was more about your adaptation.
Why did you choose to focus your point of view and show it through the creature’s perspective instead of the book, which goes through a lot of different points of view?
It first starts out with the sea captain’s, then Frankenstein’s, and then there’s about 45 pages in the middle you were talking about.
It’s interesting that you started out with the innocence of the creature himself.
Why did you choose to start out with the creature’s point of view?
Again, it’s a good question.
The main reason was I didn’t think it had ever been done. I don’t think anybody’s ever tried to tell—in all the different versions of the story that had been done, nobody had ever done it that way around.
I thought, “Hmm, maybe there’s some value, maybe there’s some currency in trying it that way.”
There’s another answer, though, which is that I did try to write the sea captain story, the Walton story, and I wrote some versions of the play in which I put that in.
It just didn’t work; it took all the air out of it.
What’s this sea captain doing? We’ve come to watch the story of Frankenstein and his monster, and then you’ve got sailors running up rigging and going, “Oh captain, I spy somebody on an ice floe.”
Before you know it, it’s a different play altogether and probably a much longer one, which takes a lot more resources.
In particular, in discussion with my director, he said, “I just don’t like that. I just think that takes the story somewhere else.”
So I just wanted to get as fast as possible into this central story of the scientist and his experiment, so I dumped it.
There are many different versions of the story that I’ve tried, and all I can say is the one I felt was strongest.
Hi, I’m Keith Daniel, and my question is about the women characters in the play.
I found it interesting that, being the daughter of a feminist like Mary Wollstonecraft, the women in Mary Shelley’s book were kind of flat and just wanted to be these perfect housewives.
Was that an intentional comment on the women?
Again, it’s an excellent question, and I don’t think it’s an intentional comment in that way.
I just think that if one looks closely at the book, the women are not at the center of the story.
It’s their bidding. As I said before, there have been many attempts to make Elizabeth into a feisty proto-feminist.
To me, it just doesn’t work; it unbalances the story.
I’ve written lots of things where it’s been really important to me to try and make good strong central female characters.
In this one, though, to me, what was essential was that the central battle was between, as I keep saying, the scientist and his experiment.
To me, all the other characters are pretty much peripheral.
Mary Shelley’s not great at writing secondary characters.
As I was working on the play, my son, who was then 18, was doing his school exams at 18 in England. He said, “Dad, I’m doing Frankenstein. I’ve got to write an essay on the Justine subplot. What have you got to say about that?”
I said, “I’ve cut it.”
So the simple answer to your question is I didn’t find them very interesting.
It’s not for one to try. I would have loved it if I could have found female characters more interesting.
Mary Shelley, though, there are no mothers in this story. She lost her mother, as we know, 11 days old.
There are no mothers; the story is entirely about fathers and sons.
I’m afraid that’s inescapable, and I felt that to try and alter that would actually be not trying to do something in the spirit of what I thought Mary Shelley was up to, but another one of these bastardized adaptations.
My name is Bob Duffy. I asked Professor Messburger this question rather facetiously, but the more I’ve heard you talk today, I’m given leave to ask a bad question by my friend Henry.
My question is, given the unconscious desire to create humanity, do you not think there’s a similar desire to create monsters?
If we move that into the political realm, do you not think that the electorate, when it gets angry enough and forms a mob, is out with everything except the pitchforks?
Do you think that we create our own living political horrible evil monsters time and time again, especially now?
Well, I don’t think just especially now. I think throughout history we’ve done so.
We seem to have this propensity; every once in a while, we throw out really awful monsters. We’ve got a few of them at the moment.
But as usual, there are a few of them.
I have to say I don’t think that was really on Mary Shelley’s agenda.
I don’t think she’s really got that kind of political angle going on in this book, even though I sense she’s very influenced by the ideals of the French Revolution, which I think it is.
I don’t think she has particularly—perhaps because she’s only 18 or 19 years old—I don’t think she’s really got much to say about politics or about political evil in the world.
One can infer that certainly from her creation, but I don’t think it’s her intention.
Well, her intentions aside, one thing that art offers us a chance to do is to move it off the literal page and into the public’s consciousness.
I think that in that way, I thought about it a lot.
That monster amongst us looks a lot like...
But then one is led to say, “Is Hitler as evil as he is because he was treated badly as a child?”
The answer is almost certainly no.
If you take the model of Frankenstein and try to apply it to a political evil, I think you come unstuck quite fast.
I think politically, it probably comes from somewhere slightly other.
I don’t think it’s...
I think Mary Shelley’s evil monster looks simplistic compared to our political monsters today.
Thank you!
Okay!
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