Danny Boyle’s staged version of Frankenstein packed in the crowds to the National Theatre last year with its Olympian scale and throbbing orange sunsets. But if you were hoping for a
more intimate invitation to the world of Mary Shelley’s monster, you might be better off popping down to the small but central Jermyn Street Theatre, for fringe company Primavera’s new production of Bloody Poetry.
Howard Brenton’s 1984 play is unflinching in its depiction of the feckless ménage of poets that produced not only Frankenstein, but also Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ and Percy Shelley’s ‘Masque of Anarchy’, along with a traveling assortment of illegitimate children.
Yet in Tom Littler’s engaging, if occasionally uneven, revival Brenton’s lightness of touch shines through, illuminating a sensitive and sympathetic world of disruptive visions and domestic distress, in ‘which life seems more a haunting than a history’.
On the shores of Lake Geneva, Mary Shelley’s stepsister, Claire, insists she’s only sleeping with Lord Byron in order to help her in-laws get to know him better – ‘for the good of English poetry!’ – but her devoted self-debasement soon suggests otherwise.
Rhiannon Sommers’ intelligent, matronly Mary is more concerned with paying the hotel bill and establishing the limits on her husband’s dream of free love, but she still has time to turn Plato into poetry and beat Byron at his own game of dramatising human indignity.
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