Frankenstein by Peggy Webling
Miss Webling, translating into terms of the theatre Mary Shelley’s one lasting and original conception, has unquestionably succeeded in bringing the monster to life; but the play in which she exhibits this wild beast is as flimsy as a bird cage. The monster bursts through the bars and insists on exhibiting himself in a light rather less subdued than that of the play. He appeals to our sympathy, not as the hideous phantasm of a man created by a presumptuous student for his own chastisement, but rather as a symbol of humanity itself adrift in an uncaring void. There is altogether too much life in him to remember that he is the handwork of the shadowy Frankenstein. And we are constantly forgetting why the still more shadowy creatures who cluster so stupidly about him should necessarily abhor him and withhold from him the knowledge that all men have the right to possess.
The play is obviously designed, however, to emphasize the tragic aspect of Frankenstein’s life. We see him as a passionate student, who, having devoted himself to the search for the principle of life, is trembling with hopes and fears over the imitation of a human being which he has manufactured. In the inevitable thunderstorm he endows it with vitality, and in succeeding scenes we are made to see how he comes to realize that he has set in motion a force beyond his power to control. His sense of having encroached upon divine prerogative is hardly touched upon, nor is it explained why he stops short of doing what is necessary to render this force independent.
Our interest in the monster, who thrills the nerves less than he shakes the heart, carries us through the dull middle reaches of the play to the final scene in which the pathetic creature kills the master who will not provide him with “a mate,” and is himself killed by lightning. The death of Frankenstein seems to settle nothing, and the stroke of lightning appears to cut a knot which it would have been interesting to see unravelled.
Mr. Hamilton Deane’s monster is nearly all of the play that is worth watching, but that is much. It is an extremely fine study in the macabre. The rest of the play that is worth watching consists of the pleasant, flamboyant flashes of Mr. Hallatt’s Frankenstein. Nobody else has a chance, or can be expected to succeed in making one.
