Last week I went to see a rebroadcast of National Theatre Live’s production of Frankenstein. The play was adapted by from the novel by Nick Dear, and directed by Danny Boyle. It stars Johnny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch on alternate nights as the monster and Victor Frankenstein. There are many interesting things to comment on in the production—the very cool steam-punk set design, the script and direction’s choice to explicitly frame the two primary characters as doubles of one another, the considerable amount of reference to the novel’s conversation with Paradise Lost—but the thing that I am most interested in exploring here is the way in which, while following very closely to portions of the novel, the adaptation foregrounds the experience of the monster.  The play makes what in the novel is a (substantial) narrative interlude, the monster’s story as told to Victor, the heart of the story.

Dear and Boyle’s play wisely forgoes the elaborate frame narrative of the novel (there is no Captain Walton sending letters to his sister here) and begins with monster’s awakening from a kind of womb-like orb, clearly the means of his reanimation. This sequence, and what follows for the next act or so if primarily from the point of the view of the monster, chronicling his experience. It follows with his flight from Ingolstadt, his rejection from the society of human beings, and his education by DeLancey. This material is drawn specifically from the monster’s own narrative in volume two of the novel. While in the novel the monster’s narrative is presented framed several times (by Victor who is retelling the story to Walton, and by Walton who is transcribing Victor’s retelling of the story in letters to his sister) on the stage it is unmediated. The audience witnesses the pain and fear as the monster begins to discover his limbs, the joy of the sun and the rain, the pain of the savage beatings. The play is not front-loaded with Victor’s obsessive needs, with his guilt, his justifications, his egotism. Rather we follow the monster as he discovers his voice, struggles to understand his terrible marginality, comes to realize that the world will always reject him.

All of these things are in the novel. Indeed, with a few minor exceptions I found Dear’s script to cleave incredibly closely to the portion of the book he chose to adapt. However, what really works in the play is the way in which it re-centers the story on the experience of the monster. Dear realizes that we don’t need another story about Victor.* This understanding allows him to create a work of art that does something really extraordinary, it allows us to see what is already there in a new and vibrant way.

*Besides, the quintessential film adaptation of the novel has already been made.