Frankenstein’s monster mash-up

MARY SHELLEY was just 18 when she started her novel that has stood the test of 200 years, so I struggle to believe she was any kind of airhead.

Rona Munro’s excitable new adaptation of the gothic horror story, however, portrays Shelley as a giddy teenage diarist rather than the complex thinker she surely was.

The idea may be to make this production more ‘relatable’ to GCSE students, but it comes at the cost of dumbing down.

Performed with rubber-ball verve by Eilidh Loan, Shelley is on stage almost throughout, making up the story and telling her characters what to do. She is, essentially, a literary bossy boots as she takes charge of Dr Frankenstein’s ghoulish experiments. At one point she congratulates herself, saying: ‘That was a proper death bed scene . . . you’re welcome!’

All right, it got a laugh, but I’m more interested in the action than Shelley’s self-opinion.

Meanwhile, Ben Castle-Gibb’s Frankenstein goes almost crosseyed with self-reproach over his god-like presumption to create life. The plight of his monster is slightly lost amid all the hand-wringing, but Michael Moreland’s rangy zombie impresses as the anti-hero; he bestrides the stage like a buff and articulate Poldark extra.

Patricia Benecke’s production is easy on the eye, with a set that looks like Narnia before the thaw. Our actors shimmy up and down barren, white trees and disappear in and out of coffin-like doorways.

Traces of Shelley’s pre-woke thinking make it through the edit, including her insistence that great men needn’t worry about small matters like conscience or family.

But after that stab in the eye for feminism, it ends with Shelley declaiming about power and responsibility in a story I could have sworn was more about liberty and daring.