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gayalondiel_bakTo say I liked Danny Boyle's "liberal adaptation of Frankenstein" would be an understatement. I thought it was pretty phenomenal. Lots of people have written more fluently than I can about the setting, the language, the staging, the acting, the effective intimacy of it, so I'm going to restrain myself to the most important part for me - the storytelling. (This is not to say that I didn't appreciate the acting - Messers Miller and Cumberbatch were equally wonderful. Once I've seen the screening with the roles reversed I suspect I will have more to say on that front).
Above all things, I love a good story. Preferably with a speculative element, or a presentation of a human hero, or something glorious and mad and with something to say. (I don't read published fiction about whether X and Y are going to have sex before the end of the novel, no matter how many Nick Hornbys Dramaboy gives me). I am fortunate that Frankenstein was my first proper science fiction novel (discounting the Star Wars EU) because it gave me a chance to come to it with eyes as close to those that came to it 200 years ago as possible. Of course the tropes and conventions of modern fiction were firmly instilled in me at age 14 so I couldn't have viewed it the same, but I could still bring an element of innocence to the story.
Shelley writes from Frankenstein's point of view throughout, with the exception of the monster monologue. Even so, we still only really see through Victor's eyes, understand his point of view of his own actions and so we are left without that final damning understanding that it was All His Fault that the Creature turned out evil. It's implied throughout but never explicitly stated and at the end the Captain is still firmly on Victor's side.
These days, we can't help but read sympathy for the Creature into the story. We have the weight of almost 200 years of literature and cultural development and a good 100 years of "mainstream" science fiction and fantasy. We have Gollum. We have I Am Legend. We have umpteen adaptations of the Phantom of the Opera. We are used to looking at the monsters and seeing ourselves. And so any modern adaptation, inevitably, will focus on the Creature. Victor is a man, but perhaps more than that he is a trope - the original mad scientist, the flawed genius without the psychosocial understanding of his responsibilities even as he tells us that it was his tender upbringing that instilled in him the goodness and kindness of his mother. To be kind to Victor, he has never seen a creature like this before. We have, and we see the human in it a long time before he does, if in the novel you could consider that he ever does (Dear has at least given him a moment of realisation in the final scene: "You understand it better than I. Do you have a soul, and I none?"). We see the Creature, an innocent, a child, left to make his own way in the world and pitying him. I wonder if this is right.
Cumberbatch's portrayal of the Creature (and I assume Miller's is similar) was like nothing I'd ever seen. Most Creatures - indeed, most denziens of the Uncanny Valley - move as if through rigor mortis. This Creature moved in exaggerated forms and spoke slowly and deliberately, like a child. It was a lovely approach and I confess to finding the first ten minutes of the play utterly captivating for just the exploration of what it was to make grown limbs move without knowing how. As I settled into the physicality of the performance, though, I realised that it reminded mer very powerfully of Gollum, and Navyboy and I extrapolated from there. Forgive me my flights of fancy.
Gollum and the Creature are sort of alike and sort of polar opposites. Both are utterly pitiable creations, monsters who are stuck in the place between the right thing and the unspeakably psychotic. Gollum comes from evil (starting with Déagol) and moves towards pity - the Creature starts with innocence and moves away. Both are still conflicted killers in the end and both must inevitably die. But from reading what other people have said about the Creature, I get the same feeling as I did when the LotR movies came out and the gestalt understanding of Gollum shifted quite significantly into the pity realm without leaving much room for consternation. Yes, I know Gandalf says that we should pity Gollum - but he never says to forget that Gollum is a killer. Lots of people did, I do sometimes, but I do remember the days before he was a cute CGI creation and it was easier to think of him as being a conflicted and ultimately not very sympathetic character.
The Creature is likewise a killer. I almost feel that we are too ready to read into him the same sympathy that leads people into Erik/Christine shipping - because we feel sorry for them, we forget their evil actions. In this production I don't actually lay that at the door of Nick Dear. He gave us a Creature that established a relationship with de Lacey for a year, not an afternoon - and then burnt him alive, not just his house, when he didn't get his way. I wonder if the audience is maybe too ready to forget that. There is also, in this adaptation, the bridal chamber expansion. Although Navyboy and I are agreed that as that moment does happen off-stage in the novel, there's no reason you couldn't read the extra stuff in.
This Creature is innocent, in degrees, but not blameless or defensible in the way that some people try to argue. He does evil, and what's more, he knows it. ("My heart is black. It stinks. My mind, once filled with dreams of beauty, is a furnace of revenge!") This Creature, like Shelley's, understands how far he is fallen and that he cannot climb back, can only go on to the ultimate end of death with his creator, and however much we would like to think he could be reclaimed, it's just not possible. The speech patterns given to him in the play do, however, emphasize that this is Victor's fault. Shelley's Creature is eloquent - Dear's Creature speaks, and maybe therefore reasons, like a child. Victor should have taken better care of him. But he is still a monster. Gollum speaks like a child, but that only masks the vicious intent behind his words.
Of course, Miller's Victor helps with sympathising with the devil. Victor in the novels is likeable enough, if misled, before the creation, and reasonably pitiable afterwards (apart from being more interested in exploring subtext with Henry than he is with facing up to what he's done). Because of the temporal displacement of Victor's character development, he becomes a brat. Instead of being passive to his father and Elizabeth he is, let's face it, a dick. He doesn't acquiesce to the Creature's request for a bride due to the sense of obligation that does come through in the book, but because he needs to have his mad scientist moment - serving to illustrate that he has not lost his lesson. Of course, his selfishness in assuming the Creature is after him and not Elizabeth is intact. Overall Miller plays him terribly unsympathetically, whereas Shelley writes a character traumatised by his own stupidity and finally gives him more screen time at the end where he desperately and determinedly chases the Creature to their deaths. I wonder if Cumberbatch may instill in him a little more sympathy - I have certainly read that Miller's Creature has the edge in psychosis. But the sheer unlikeablility of Victor serves to support the Creature as sympathetic, whereas if Victor was tormented and more comfortable as a character it would be easier to see the evils of the Creature for what they are.
That was one long session of Creature bashing. I didn't really mean it to be. He's pretty much my favourite character in the whole of SF literature, and I have truly delighted in seeing this interpretation. I think they could do away with the word "liberal" being beamed onto the National Theatre. I have not seen all the Frankenstein movies, but I have seen a lot, starting with Karloff's criminal brained child in a big green body; and I think this is the most true interpretation I have seen, bearing in mind the adjustments that you have to make to take into account two centuries of cultural and social development. It wasn't the book exactly, it was... fanfiction.
I don't denigrate Nick Dear when I say that. I read and write fanfiction, and watching Frankenstein has really helped me articulate why. I adore the source text, but Dear took aspects of it I had never thought of and teased them into a new likeness. He asked how to make the Creature learning language and philosophy more plausible (honestly, who could learn to read from Paradise Lost and Plutarch alone) and expanded the relationship with de Lacey, imparting a power to the betrayal that breaks the heart even more. He lampshades elements that I hadn't made explicit in my mind - the Creature's early education is Rome and empire building and the stories of kings. Of course he will take revenge when he is wronged. That's what the books tell him to do. The Creature interacts with Victor in a way we don't see in the book because we see from one point of view, but is utterly natural viewed from the outside. And the bridal chamber - it's a missing scene. We never see what happens with Elizabeth and the Creature; and Dear has given us what any one of us, if presented with the original scenes in the form of a TV show, might write into a fic. A missing scene, a character expansion. When we write fic we do it to explore the story, to share and explain and understand the humanity and vulgarity of a tale. We bond over it, we write expansions and missing scenes and variations and AUs to explore just what it is to be human, to be a monster, to fully comprehend what it is that the story is telling us.
(Okay. Sometimes we write for porn too. But that's not my major driving influence in fanfic.)
One of the things I love most about the folk tradition is that you get dozens, hundreds of versions of the same stories, because the instinctive thing to do with them is play and make them your own and tell someone what you think it means, and then let them tell you what they think it means, until you either come to agreement or agree to interpret it differently. And why do that in academic terms, when you can do it by telling more stories, writing more scenes, expanding the human understanding of what you've been presented. That's what we do, and that's what Boyle and Dear have done, and I'll tell you a secret:
It's better than the book.
Well... no. It's not. I feel dirty just saying that. But it brings the book to a modern audience, fills our need to understand and appreciate the psychological motivations of creator and creature, and still manages to present a sense of relationship closer to our modern understanding of that need than a book written 200 years ago. That's not to say that Shelley's writing isn't awesome, because it really, really is, but by playing with it we are able to make it our own. We can only go forward, and that is what this production has done.
Other things I liked.
The bit parts. My god, the Scottish guys. There wasn't a single part in this production that wasn't considered and clever and brilliant.
The feminism. Thank you, Dear, for an Elizabeth who wasn't a total drip. Thank you for making Shelley's point about not divorcing women from the creation of life explicit in Elizabeth's dialogue - both with her wanting to go to England, and later with the incessant baby talk. Not subtle, and you may not agree with the point of view, but Shelley was alive and well in that.
Benedict Cumberbatch. Precisely because not once, not one time did I think "That's Benedict Cumberbatch" until he came out to the curtain calls. He was the Creature, in a way that is rare for me to see famous actors (Tennent's Hamlet took a good couple of scenes to stop being Ten for me).
The physical presentation. Lights. Sounds. Dramaboy will be able to articulate this better when we go in April.
Above all things, I love a good story. Preferably with a speculative element, or a presentation of a human hero, or something glorious and mad and with something to say. (I don't read published fiction about whether X and Y are going to have sex before the end of the novel, no matter how many Nick Hornbys Dramaboy gives me). I am fortunate that Frankenstein was my first proper science fiction novel (discounting the Star Wars EU) because it gave me a chance to come to it with eyes as close to those that came to it 200 years ago as possible. Of course the tropes and conventions of modern fiction were firmly instilled in me at age 14 so I couldn't have viewed it the same, but I could still bring an element of innocence to the story.
Shelley writes from Frankenstein's point of view throughout, with the exception of the monster monologue. Even so, we still only really see through Victor's eyes, understand his point of view of his own actions and so we are left without that final damning understanding that it was All His Fault that the Creature turned out evil. It's implied throughout but never explicitly stated and at the end the Captain is still firmly on Victor's side.
These days, we can't help but read sympathy for the Creature into the story. We have the weight of almost 200 years of literature and cultural development and a good 100 years of "mainstream" science fiction and fantasy. We have Gollum. We have I Am Legend. We have umpteen adaptations of the Phantom of the Opera. We are used to looking at the monsters and seeing ourselves. And so any modern adaptation, inevitably, will focus on the Creature. Victor is a man, but perhaps more than that he is a trope - the original mad scientist, the flawed genius without the psychosocial understanding of his responsibilities even as he tells us that it was his tender upbringing that instilled in him the goodness and kindness of his mother. To be kind to Victor, he has never seen a creature like this before. We have, and we see the human in it a long time before he does, if in the novel you could consider that he ever does (Dear has at least given him a moment of realisation in the final scene: "You understand it better than I. Do you have a soul, and I none?"). We see the Creature, an innocent, a child, left to make his own way in the world and pitying him. I wonder if this is right.
Cumberbatch's portrayal of the Creature (and I assume Miller's is similar) was like nothing I'd ever seen. Most Creatures - indeed, most denziens of the Uncanny Valley - move as if through rigor mortis. This Creature moved in exaggerated forms and spoke slowly and deliberately, like a child. It was a lovely approach and I confess to finding the first ten minutes of the play utterly captivating for just the exploration of what it was to make grown limbs move without knowing how. As I settled into the physicality of the performance, though, I realised that it reminded mer very powerfully of Gollum, and Navyboy and I extrapolated from there. Forgive me my flights of fancy.
Gollum and the Creature are sort of alike and sort of polar opposites. Both are utterly pitiable creations, monsters who are stuck in the place between the right thing and the unspeakably psychotic. Gollum comes from evil (starting with Déagol) and moves towards pity - the Creature starts with innocence and moves away. Both are still conflicted killers in the end and both must inevitably die. But from reading what other people have said about the Creature, I get the same feeling as I did when the LotR movies came out and the gestalt understanding of Gollum shifted quite significantly into the pity realm without leaving much room for consternation. Yes, I know Gandalf says that we should pity Gollum - but he never says to forget that Gollum is a killer. Lots of people did, I do sometimes, but I do remember the days before he was a cute CGI creation and it was easier to think of him as being a conflicted and ultimately not very sympathetic character.
The Creature is likewise a killer. I almost feel that we are too ready to read into him the same sympathy that leads people into Erik/Christine shipping - because we feel sorry for them, we forget their evil actions. In this production I don't actually lay that at the door of Nick Dear. He gave us a Creature that established a relationship with de Lacey for a year, not an afternoon - and then burnt him alive, not just his house, when he didn't get his way. I wonder if the audience is maybe too ready to forget that. There is also, in this adaptation, the bridal chamber expansion. Although Navyboy and I are agreed that as that moment does happen off-stage in the novel, there's no reason you couldn't read the extra stuff in.
This Creature is innocent, in degrees, but not blameless or defensible in the way that some people try to argue. He does evil, and what's more, he knows it. ("My heart is black. It stinks. My mind, once filled with dreams of beauty, is a furnace of revenge!") This Creature, like Shelley's, understands how far he is fallen and that he cannot climb back, can only go on to the ultimate end of death with his creator, and however much we would like to think he could be reclaimed, it's just not possible. The speech patterns given to him in the play do, however, emphasize that this is Victor's fault. Shelley's Creature is eloquent - Dear's Creature speaks, and maybe therefore reasons, like a child. Victor should have taken better care of him. But he is still a monster. Gollum speaks like a child, but that only masks the vicious intent behind his words.
Of course, Miller's Victor helps with sympathising with the devil. Victor in the novels is likeable enough, if misled, before the creation, and reasonably pitiable afterwards (apart from being more interested in exploring subtext with Henry than he is with facing up to what he's done). Because of the temporal displacement of Victor's character development, he becomes a brat. Instead of being passive to his father and Elizabeth he is, let's face it, a dick. He doesn't acquiesce to the Creature's request for a bride due to the sense of obligation that does come through in the book, but because he needs to have his mad scientist moment - serving to illustrate that he has not lost his lesson. Of course, his selfishness in assuming the Creature is after him and not Elizabeth is intact. Overall Miller plays him terribly unsympathetically, whereas Shelley writes a character traumatised by his own stupidity and finally gives him more screen time at the end where he desperately and determinedly chases the Creature to their deaths. I wonder if Cumberbatch may instill in him a little more sympathy - I have certainly read that Miller's Creature has the edge in psychosis. But the sheer unlikeablility of Victor serves to support the Creature as sympathetic, whereas if Victor was tormented and more comfortable as a character it would be easier to see the evils of the Creature for what they are.
That was one long session of Creature bashing. I didn't really mean it to be. He's pretty much my favourite character in the whole of SF literature, and I have truly delighted in seeing this interpretation. I think they could do away with the word "liberal" being beamed onto the National Theatre. I have not seen all the Frankenstein movies, but I have seen a lot, starting with Karloff's criminal brained child in a big green body; and I think this is the most true interpretation I have seen, bearing in mind the adjustments that you have to make to take into account two centuries of cultural and social development. It wasn't the book exactly, it was... fanfiction.
I don't denigrate Nick Dear when I say that. I read and write fanfiction, and watching Frankenstein has really helped me articulate why. I adore the source text, but Dear took aspects of it I had never thought of and teased them into a new likeness. He asked how to make the Creature learning language and philosophy more plausible (honestly, who could learn to read from Paradise Lost and Plutarch alone) and expanded the relationship with de Lacey, imparting a power to the betrayal that breaks the heart even more. He lampshades elements that I hadn't made explicit in my mind - the Creature's early education is Rome and empire building and the stories of kings. Of course he will take revenge when he is wronged. That's what the books tell him to do. The Creature interacts with Victor in a way we don't see in the book because we see from one point of view, but is utterly natural viewed from the outside. And the bridal chamber - it's a missing scene. We never see what happens with Elizabeth and the Creature; and Dear has given us what any one of us, if presented with the original scenes in the form of a TV show, might write into a fic. A missing scene, a character expansion. When we write fic we do it to explore the story, to share and explain and understand the humanity and vulgarity of a tale. We bond over it, we write expansions and missing scenes and variations and AUs to explore just what it is to be human, to be a monster, to fully comprehend what it is that the story is telling us.
(Okay. Sometimes we write for porn too. But that's not my major driving influence in fanfic.)
One of the things I love most about the folk tradition is that you get dozens, hundreds of versions of the same stories, because the instinctive thing to do with them is play and make them your own and tell someone what you think it means, and then let them tell you what they think it means, until you either come to agreement or agree to interpret it differently. And why do that in academic terms, when you can do it by telling more stories, writing more scenes, expanding the human understanding of what you've been presented. That's what we do, and that's what Boyle and Dear have done, and I'll tell you a secret:
It's better than the book.
Well... no. It's not. I feel dirty just saying that. But it brings the book to a modern audience, fills our need to understand and appreciate the psychological motivations of creator and creature, and still manages to present a sense of relationship closer to our modern understanding of that need than a book written 200 years ago. That's not to say that Shelley's writing isn't awesome, because it really, really is, but by playing with it we are able to make it our own. We can only go forward, and that is what this production has done.
Other things I liked.
The bit parts. My god, the Scottish guys. There wasn't a single part in this production that wasn't considered and clever and brilliant.
The feminism. Thank you, Dear, for an Elizabeth who wasn't a total drip. Thank you for making Shelley's point about not divorcing women from the creation of life explicit in Elizabeth's dialogue - both with her wanting to go to England, and later with the incessant baby talk. Not subtle, and you may not agree with the point of view, but Shelley was alive and well in that.
Benedict Cumberbatch. Precisely because not once, not one time did I think "That's Benedict Cumberbatch" until he came out to the curtain calls. He was the Creature, in a way that is rare for me to see famous actors (Tennent's Hamlet took a good couple of scenes to stop being Ten for me).
The physical presentation. Lights. Sounds. Dramaboy will be able to articulate this better when we go in April.
