COMMENT

A Scottish theatre company is to bring the life story of Mary Shelley to the stage to mark the 200th anniversary of her most celebrated creation – Frankenstein.

The show, which will premiere at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow in April, will lift the lid on how her haunted dreams about the loss of a premature baby inspired her to write the story that would define her for the rest of her life.

Billed as “an outlandish trip through the mind of one of literature’s most influential imaginations”, The Monster and Mary Shelley will explore how the teenage writer recovered from the loss of her daughter to create the classic Gothic horror story.

Glasgow theatre company The Occasion has pledged to turn the story of its genesis into an “atmospheric, moving and at times darkly comic exploration of fear”.

Born in London in 1797, the then Mary Godwin was 17 when she met and fell for married poet Percy Shelley.

The couple left England for France then travelled throughout Europe together only for tragedy to strike when

“Mary Shelley was a woman many years before her time and maintains a striking resonance in the present day”

PETER CLERKE