Frankenstein (Little)
Miss Peggy Webling’s Frankenstein, an adventure in the macabre founded on Mary Shelley’s novel, makes no attempt to follow the detailed plot or even the main lines of development of the original. Mrs. Shelley’s monster, after a vain appeal to his creator for sympathy, plunges into a long series of crimes both cruel and cunning in a dark spirit of implacable revenge. The author in fact piles on the agony. Miss Webling is much more discreet; her monster makes a direct appeal to our sympathy; our disapproval is in fact reserved for the young student who has stumbled upon this dreadful secret of the infusion of life into dead matter collected from coffin and charnel-house and laboriously modelled into human form. He is too obsessed with horror (not perhaps unnaturally) to be able to recognise and foster the dawning instincts of tenderness and love of beauty in the beast-man he has created; and ridden by fear of his creature, after the first short period of mastery, in which he rules by lash and savage threat.
Nor are his friends much more perceptive. It is his little crippled sister, Katrine, who alone shows signs of being able to control the brute by her sympathy and goodness. Her death at his hands is not due to any lust to kill, but to the desire to see the pretty white thing fluttering on the shining surface of the lake. He is overwhelmed by new sensations of pity as he gazes down upon the little drowned body, which he has tenderly carried into the house, lying still and silent.
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An interesting and intelligent adaptation.
There were inevitably some absurdities and an intolerable and unnecessary amount of explanation and discussion tiresomely repeated, and I am afraid poor young Frankenstein became a horrible bore. But there is no doubt that the author, with the assistance of Mr. Hamilton Deane (the “monster” and producer), achieved her effect. The coming to life in the Prologue, suitably heralded by high winds, swinging skeletons, thunder and lightning, was definitely impressive. Even the more difficult ending in smoke and flash and odour of chemicals did not at once break the spell. The brute, who had become a tyrant, vindictive and inexorable, has extorted a promise from Henry Frankenstein that he will provide him with a mate. With difficulty the old Professor persuades him to be brave enough to break this promise and so prevent such an infamy as the perpetuation of this terrible species. The elixir is poured into the brazier; the formula is destroyed; the brute-man strangles his creator, and at the moment of his death a thunderbolt consumes the man-made man and modelled woman that was ready to be stirred into life. And one didn’t really wish to giggle. That is indeed a notable testimonial to the power of Mr. Hamilton Deane’s presentation. The study was admirably controlled, and it might so easily have been overdone to slip over the edge of the bizarre into the ridiculous. The first clumsy bestial movements and harsh unintelligible utterances, the signs of wider sense-perceptions, of growing understanding of ideas, the pathetic hunger for sympathy and understanding, the baffled rage at being spurned, the gust of animal desire stirred by the sight of Frankenstein’s Emilie—all this was most adroitly and impressively done.
Mr. Henry Hallatt (Henry Frankenstein) was compelled by the complexion of the piece to rave and rant in a long-departed mode, alternating with such excursions as “Go on Father; I love to hear your voice. It is like the strain of old familiar music.” He did it all very well in the barn-storming tradition. But the ah-woe-is-me note was too monotonous and protracted for our comfort. As for Dr. Waldman and Victor, they were compelled by their parts to be ineffectual. Mr. Stuart Lomath was a very hearty Baron Frankenstein, with a rich Irish accent that would have startled the natives of Goldstadt. The Baron thought, perceptive fellow, that there was something rather odd about that young man, the monster, when he met him!
In effect the whole piece was just Frankenstein’s Frankenstein and Mr. Hamilton Deane; the rest were merely background.
T.
