Monster Incredible but Real. Woman’s Play Based on Woman’s Book.

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Even after R.U.R.—a much finer play on a similar theme—Frankenstein, at the Little Theatre, is by no means intolerably unreal.  After all, Mary Shelley invented the idea of the soulless man built by a scientist, even if Miss Peggy Webling is not the first to put it on the stage.

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In its eighteenth century setting, which bestows upon it the more or less glamour of the historical, the play does hold some measure of agreeable horror.
 

You can laugh it away, if you want to, but sensible playgoers will not try to pick holes in it, and will be rewarded by some reasonable genuine and high-class thrills.
 

 

Incredible, but Convincing.

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Most of them are furnished by Mr. Hamilton Deane in the part of the monster, repulsive but somehow pitiful, incredible yet extraordinarily convincing.

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Looking and behaving like a mixture of Man Friday and Primo Carnera,  Mr. Deane achieved much by his voice, halting, stammering, wholy [sic] lacking in human warmth and sense of style, which more than anything created the illusion that he was something more terrible and more amazing than an imbecile freak.

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Mr. Henry Hallatt, as Frankenstein, his creator, was a little too stagey, and the rest of the acting was on the stiff side.

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The Test of a “Thriller.”

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Even so, and with a personal tendency to sneer at this kind of thriller, I found that Frankenstein held my attention and agitated some of my feelings, if not my deepest emotions.

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On its merits it deserves a bigger success than Dracula.

 

J. G. B.