Frankenstein. New Version of an Old Theme.

Though an ingenious thrill has still power to amuse us, old-fashioned, spectral drama is, of course, for terrifying purposes a thing of the past—for a West End audience. This had to be taken for granted by Miss Peggy Webling in her remarkable fresh and original version of Frankenstein, presented with well-merited favour at the Little Theatre last night.

It was certainly a far better adaptation than that by the late Stephen Phillips. Indeed, one felt that if only Miss Webling had been a little more daring in her innovations and transmuted Mrs. Shelley’s “modern Prometheus” into present-day life—not worried about convincing us of possibility, but made it just a fantastic, allegorical comedy, rather on the lines of R.U.R.—the extremely able acting of Mr. Hamilton Deane in the part of the monster himself would have had a better chance.
 

As it is, Miss Webling keeps to the Eighteenth Century setting and the main ethical purpose. Frankenstein creates the monster, gives it life with the elixir still unknown to Sir Oliver Lodge, and is finally killed by his own creation because he refuses to supply it with a mate like itself. Utterly out-of-date from a scientific point of view though it all is, this part of the meaning is true and humanly appealing now as ever.

 

Beauty and the Beast
 

What Miss Webling has done on her own account is to bring touches of Beauty and the Beast which are entirely foreign to Mrs Shelley’s always scarifying original. She brings in a crippled girl, Katrine, who is kind to the Monster, and whom he inadvertently drowns and brings home in his arms. She makes the Monster drink a glass of wine with Frankenstein’s father, who is surprised at the “roughness” of his son’s “friend.” All this is in the right direction; but it does not quite fit in with the remnants of the old spectre-story.

 
However, the Monster is acted so well by Mr. Hamilton Deane that it would be a pity if the play did not get through in some form. One doubts if even Cooke, whose performance so pleased Mrs. Shelley when she saw the original stage-version, can have given the Monster a truer character of its own than Mr. Deane does. It was a piece of genuine, imaginative work, which gripped the audience always—intelligent and not too horrible.

The rest was done in heavy, stilted melodramatic style, which seemed rather a mistake—in the circumstances.

 

S. R. L.