“Monstrous and Humane.”

“To him who sends forth his remarks upon the theatre once a month, there constantly occurs the disheartening reflection, that long ere the day of publication shall arrive, the objects of his remarks will have been completely forgotten; and consequently no interest will attach itself to his strictures, though they may be distinguished by most profound ideas, and the smartest observations.”

These words, penned in 1824, still strike upon the monthly critic’s consciousness with an ironic and uncanny precision. That is not my chief reason however for reprinting them. They for a preface to a critique in “The Drama, or Theatrical Pocket Magazine”; their subject being a play called Presumption! or, the Fate of Frankenstein, based on the novel written by Mrs. Wollstonecraft Shelley in 1816; and the reviewer, with more space at his command than falls to his successors’ lot, lets himself go in reproducing what has been, to him, a very lurid experience. He speaks of “mental torture ... this dreadful story ... terrific, fearful ... the frightful, nameless and speechless creation of Frankenstein”; and concludes – not a little incongruously—with a report of the “much boisterous applause” to which this thriller was played.

 

Now comes the sequel—Frankenstein, dramatised afresh by Miss Peggy Webling and produced at the Little Theatre by Mr. Hamilton Deane of Dracula fame. A fine subject, certainly: this story of a scientist, creating synthetic man and having to abide the consequences: a play with moments of grim horror which make even the most sophisticated modern audience gasp. Too crudely melodramatic, perhaps? But it is difficult to see how else Miss Webling’s version could be played; and she succeeds in dodging, pretty consistently, the lurking bathos which is the chief danger in such an attempt. For its literary associations alone the present version would be worth seeing.

 

Graham Sutton