REVIEW: Mary Shelley, People's Theatre, Newcastle
The girl behind Frankenstein
A colourful array of characters populates Helen Edmundson’s play, first staged in 2012, and all are brought to life entertainingly here and with evident relish.
It was good to see Holly Stamp in the title role after her engaging performance in the People’s Studio performance of Orca last year, along with other members of that cast.
She radiates youthful certainty as young Mary Shelley, defying convention in a manner once endorsed by her father, political philosopher William Godwin, who produced a tract called Enquiry Concerning Political Justice in which he seemed to suggest anarchy might have something going for it.
But it’s one thing to mull over concepts – quite another when they’re used to justify your teenage daughter’s fling with a louche young poet.
That’s Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose name alone can send girls into raptures, and for Joe Moore it’s a peach of a role, allowing him to strut about as admiring female voices trill about how “utterly and unspeakably thrilling” things are.
Not everyone thinks so, though.
Shelley’s wife, for one, poor Harriet (Emma Jane Robson radiating extreme annoyance) who has a child and another on the way.
Dip into the lives of any of these figures from history and you’ll realise it could have been a very different play and no less entertaining or true.
There could be a thousand plays about Mary Shelley and many would undoubtedly focus on her creation of Frankenstein, though the name’s never mentioned here.
Of more pressing concern is the web of complex relationships within an extended family of big personalities.
Mary we first meet as a 16-year-old on her return from boarding school, greeted with varying degrees of enthusiasm by her family.
They’re stepsister Jane (Minnie Dobson), half-sister Fanny (Ashton Matthews), dad William (Andrew De’Ath, brow furrowing furiously as his character falls hostage to the principles he set in print) and the second Mrs Godwin (Anna Dobson letting rip), who though painted as gloriously ghastly may actually have been the only sensible one among them.
There are moments of laugh-out-loud comedy but there’s an inescapable dark side too.
Poor Fanny doesn’t stay the course, Shelley meets a watery grave and Mr Godwin feasibly becomes the monster rampaging through his headstrong daughter’s embryonic novel.
Directed by Tracey Lucas and Matthew Hope, it unfolds on an epic set which is also a shrine to the character who didn’t even live long enough to make the first scene.
The first Mrs Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, famous advocate of women’s rights, died soon after giving birth to the feisty future author of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.
Monumental copies of her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman sit stage left like uncomfortable items of furniture, not far from her marble tomb, centre stage.
Happy families? Not really. That’s literature for you. But it does make for a rewarding evening in the theatre.
Mary Shelley runs until Saturday, February 14. Details and tickets from the People’s Theatre website.