A curious mix on offer but an absorbing piece of theatre

Young Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, later to marry poet Percy Shelley, spent some time in Dundee as a 14-year-old before she created Frankenstein (the book, not the actual monster).

In the book’s foreword, she pays tribute to Dundee where “the airy flights of my imagination were born and fostered.”

She also inherited her mother’s “feminist” genes.

Fast forward 200 years and we follow Roxanne Walker, a pupil of Dundee’s Highview Academy, as she attempts to unlock her inner feminism after facing rampant ridicule following the publication on social media of a topless photo.

Director, designer, playwright Sandy Thomson’s remit was to write a new Dundee play and she brings the two girls to life in Monstrous Bodies (Chasing Mary Shelley down Peep o’ Day Lane).

It is a curious mix, but no less absorbing piece of theatre. One minute we are revelling in Romanticism, then suddenly thrust into raucous rap.

But despite the play’s title and the ever presence of Mary Shelley, this has nothing to do with the big F. The common theme here, and to show that very little has changed in two centuries, is the treatment of the female gender.

Unfortunately, the Tardis-like jumping between times will leave the audience divided – those who want more costume drama, those who prefer to bop with the best. Sometimes, the main theme can get lost, until, that is, Roxanne’s soliloquy in the form of a talk on her Mary Shelley project in front of the whole school.

Rep graduate actor Rebekah Lumsden takes great credit as the put-upon Roxanne and she shares the plaudits with Eilidh McCormick as Mary and Elaine Stirrat, the punk pink-haired narrator, school librarian and general dogsbody.

Monstrous Bodies continues at Dundee Rep until May 6.