Frankenstein’s monstrous folly brilliantly illuminated

This brilliantly staged Shake and Stir production takes the audience to the heart of a tragic tale of unnatural acts, obsession and madness.

Darcy Brown (Frankenstein) and Jeremiah Wray (the Creature) in Shake and Stir Theatre Company's 2024 production of Frankenstein in Sydney.

What does it feel like to be human, especially if you’re not? When Frankenstein animated his Creature in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel his creation turned out to have emotions, especially a thwarted yearning to belong and a desire for companionship. Since that book was written the question has become an increasingly central part of popular culture.

The replicant Roy (Rutger Hauer) in Blade Runner feels it while he is dying (“All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain”). In the recent Poor Things the Frankenstein is Godwin Baxter, whose creation Bella (Emma Stone) struggles to learn how to be human and succeeds in a way that is morally complex but emotionally satisfying. Klara, in Kazuo Ishiguro’s brilliant novel Klara and the Sun, is a human robot who cannot articulate her feelings but we understand them. In a recent film even Barbie had a brief moment of humanity.

All this anticipates our present anxiety about so-called AI. If we could identify an AI agent as human would it want to be loved, like Frankenstein’s creation, or would it try to destroy us, as many people fear?

With this immense cultural weight behind it, and with such an intelligent script by Nelle Lee, faithful to the source, and with brilliant staging led by director Nick Skubij, Brisbane’s Shake & Stir Theatre Co’s version could hardly go wrong.

Darcy Brown (Frankenstein) and Chleó Zuel (Elisabeth) in Shake and Stir Theatre Company’s 2024 production of Frankenstein in Sydney.

The production necessarily trims the book right down, telling the story with a fast-paced urgency, simplifying but not losing its complexities and keeping its framing scenes in the Arctic. Darcy Brown is very good as a Frankenstein who is quite deranged from the beginning. This is a man already driven to distraction by the quest that he is on, travelling to the far north in an attempt to find his monster and assuage his guilt.

Jeremiah Wray is the Creature, powerful and physical but not obviously monstrous, swathed in dark for the first half but then human in his desires and humanly rather than monstrously angry when they are thwarted. He has a fine moment when he finally confronts his creator in the frozen north.

Chloe Zuel is impressive as Elizabeth, the sweet woman Frankenstein has left behind to pursue his obsessive quest, and also as his brother William.

There are fine performances by Tony Cogin, Nick James and Anna Lise Phillips as other characters. They come together to make a ghostly chorus.

Frankenstein and Elisabeth’s wedding.

Darcy Brown as Frankenstein.

But, with the solid basis of a good script and excellent performances, what makes this production so powerful is the staging. At the beginning there is smoke that seems choreographed, blown in from each side and then rising into the sky. The set, by Josh McIntosh, has hidden areas but also allows for giant screens that rise and fall and fill the stage. On these screens video by Craig Wilkinson keeps suddenly changing the scene – a landscape, a house, a room. Sometimes the onstage characters disappear and reappear in the forest it shows. Sometimes it opens out into a dizzying swirl of text – notes Frankenstein might have made as he prepared his equipment, put together the body and prepared to animate it. And sometimes everything is occluded by swelling black blotches, as if this is not something to be watched.

Then there is the animation of the Creature, agonisingly performed by Wray, lit by Trent Suid­geest, with sound by Guy Webster. I guess you don’t galvanise a collection of charnel house body parts without some special effects, and here the pyrotechnics are spectacular. But thrilling though all this is we are left, as Shelley may have meant, with the image of the Creature, a lonely outsider, his humanity in doubt, exiled and outcast.

Frankenstein. Adapted by Nelle Lee from the novel by Mary Shelley. Directed by Nick Skubij. Shake & Stir Theatre Co and John Frost for Crossroads Live. Theatre Royal, Sydney, October 3. Duration: Two hours, including interval. Bookings online. Until Sunday.