What might we expect of a 50-minute show about the genesis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in Switzerland in the summer of 1816? The title Making Monsters suggests the focus will be on the body of Frankenstein’s monster himself, the gory details of his creation and the electric moment of his coming to life. Perhaps the play will then follow the monster’s tragic fate? But if instead its focus is the famous writing competition between the young Romantics on Lake Geneva, how will this essentially interior process be dramatized?

In fact, Becky Cooper, writer and director of Making Monsters, achieves something which at its best is richer and more subtle than this crude summary would suggest. The basic narrative does indeed follow, in pared down form, the story of the flight to Switzerland of Shelley, his lover and future wife, Mary Godwin and her step-sister, Claire Clairmont, pregnant with Byron’s child. In the course of that summer without a summer, the three, together with Byron and Polidori, his companion at the Villa Diodati come up with the idea of a story-writing competition. Mary Godwin, so the legend goes, has a startling nightmare that inspires her with the story of Frankenstein.

But beneath the narrative, Cooper’s real interest is the mysterious process of creativity itself. Something of the pain of writing is conveyed by the play’s central character, Mary Godwin (played with thoughtful intensity by Cooper herself), as she searches for a story. Small details become resonant. A package of bloodied meat, which an irritable Byron (Aizaac Sidhu) thrusts under the nose of startled audience members – somewhat improbably he seems to have been to market himself – is suggestive of Victor Frankenstein’s dealings with raw flesh. Claire Clairmont’s stitching of a piece of patchwork serves both as a metaphor for Frankenstein’s gruesome stitching, and at another level, Mary Godwin’s imaginative piecing together of fragments seized in her search for a story. 

The difficulties of exposition are for the most part adroitly solved. The passing mentions of key events in the complex lives of these colossal Romantic figures are sufficient to inform those unfamiliar with their story. Byron’s recent marriage scandal, for instance, is briefly referred to; at another point, Mary Godwin reflects on the tragic death of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, shortly after giving birth. 

Other moments that could be doughily informative are transformed by fizzy ensemble work. The small cast of four uses everything at their disposal to create atmosphere. When the play opens, for example, they bang and slide small wooden packing cases, creating the strange knocks and creaks which startle Mary Godwin awake one dark London night. Excessive narrative details are avoided by neat theatrical transitions – a white bed sheet in London is a moment later being flapped out as a picnic rug and we are in Switzerland. Once there, Byron and Shelley delight in frightening the girls, larking around in white sheets, and are later discovered blotto after a drinking binge. In a lovely comic scene, Byron sleep-talks during a nightmare, his concerns revealingly petty. A naïve cry to his mother brings to mind the scene in the film This is Spinal Tap (1984) when the supposed hard rock band member is caught pleading with his mother on the phone to renew his library books.

Inevitably in such a compact piece, details are stripped out and nuance lost. Polidori remains only as a name. Mary and Shelley’s two children, a daughter dead in infancy, a son, the four-month-old William, brought with them to Geneva, disappear altogether. Almost lost too is the intellectual background of the genesis of Frankenstein. There is only a brief reference to the drama of the vitalism debate between doctors William Lawrence and his erstwhile mentor, John Abernethy. In 1814 Abernethy had propounded the idea of ‘Vitality’, a sort of supernatural life force akin to electricity ‘superadded’ to the material body: in other words, a mysterious quality which offered scientific underpinning for the belief in the existence of the soul. Lawrence roundly attacked Abernethy’s ideas in a series of public lectures at the Royal College in 1816, claiming in a notorious phrase, that the development of physiology was an unbroken chain ‘from an oyster to a man.’ ‘The theological doctrine of the soul, and its separate existence,’ he had argued, ‘has nothing to do with this physiological question … An immaterial and spiritual being could not have been discovered amid the blood and filth of the dissecting room.’ But despite there only being one reference to this in the play, it is effectively made: Claire Clairmont (Jen Painter) obliges as a corpse while Mary Godwin clearly explains the central argument.

Again it is inevitable that the play’s focus on Mary Godwin means the reduction of the other characters. In real life Shelley was deeply familiar with Lawrence’s radical ideas, having been successfully treated by him since 1815. Here Shelley (Matt Sheppard) has to be an intellectual lightweight, seeming unaware of the issue which struck at the heart of traditional theological beliefs. Slightly worrying, too, is his apparent renunciation of vegetarianism – he happily tucks into roast chicken with Byron. Byron is a particularly tricky figure to dramatize – he could so easily dominate a play whose interest is in the female characters. It is a bold, if not wholly successful move to portray him as camp – more an effeminate Oscar Wilde than a sultry seducer of both sexes. But Sidhu’s transition to the thoughtful Dr Frankenstein shows something of his range. Claire Clairmont, whose misguided pursuit of Byron in London had led to her pregnancy, has to remain a comic one-dimensional character (although done with sprightly grace) without the poignancy of a woman in her precarious position.

Golden Fire Theatre Company’s Making Monsters is a show full of youthful energy and zest and will undoubtedly be a hit at the Edinburgh Fringe where it transfers in August. Becky Cooper’s debut suggests she has a real understanding of the craft of the playwright. We look forward to seeing what her future brings.

Making Monsters, written and directed by Becky Cooper, was performed at the King’s Head Theatre, London, on 24th July 2016 and will again be performed on 30th July before transferring to Surgeon’s Hall, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, 5th-27th August.