Gore blimey: It’s Frankenstein and the mumbler from hell!
WhAT is the point of staging a play if the audience cannot hear the main actor’s lines? That basic technical failing blights a watchable — but inaudible — Frankenstein in Manchester.
The pod- shaped royal exchange Theatre is not an easy venue. Actors must play in the round and speak high to the galleries. Shane Zaza, as troubled scientist Victor Frankenstein, fails to do this.
Projection, projection, projection, as director Matthew Xia should have told his ill-cast leading man.
This is a pity, for the show has its neck-clutching moments of horror. Some in the audience whimpered and laughed nervously at the sudden blackouts and moments of gore.
Prepare to be entertained by arrays of bones and severed limbs as Dr Frankenstein sets to his work assembling a monster.
One tray of arms and legs was as neatly arranged as a butcher’s counter display of oxtails. The show uses a new adaptation by April De Angelis. If the characters of Frankenstein and Captain Walton — the polar explorer who finds the deranged doctor in the Arctic wastes — are a little stiff and prunelike, that is probably the novel’s fault.
ryan Gage’s Walton is insufferably wet. he, too, could speak up a little. Thank goodness for the more experienced Gerard McDermott (playing Frankenstein’s father) who knows how to throw his voice. Two ghoulish moments in particular are well staged, eliciting spine- shivers. Puppet warning: poor little William is represented by a doll. Groan. Mary Shelley’s story still grips, though. It makes us consider the balance of duties between Creator and created, Man and beast, man and his wards. ‘ You are my creator but I am your master, ’ thunders harry Attwell’s pitiable Creature.