Mary Shelley
Mary
Shelley, the daughter of the intellectual feminist Mary
Wollstonecraft and the radical philosopher William Godwin, was the
lover of Shelley and author of Frankenstein. Her
story is so remarkable it must be hard to know where to begin with a
theatre treatment.
Playwright
Helen Edmundson and Shared Experience (in a co-production with the
West Yorkshire Playhouse and the Nottingham Playhouse) close in on
three sisters – Mary, Fanny and Jane – at the moment the already
married Shelley comes into their lives in 1814.
This
is two years before the fateful mini-break on Lake Geneva with Lord
Byron, so vividly dramatised by Howard Brenton in Bloody
Poetry, though that episode features here, too, as a
reported interlude, before Mary returns, pregnant, to London and
reconciliation with her father on her marriage day at the end of
1816.
The
play – even though it’s something of a cut-and-paste ‘Life with
the Godwins’ counterpart to Shared Experience’s recent
Brontë saga – develops many interesting
strands: Godwin’s disapproval of his own louche protégé who
nonetheless offers a financial lifeline when business falters; the
friendship and rivalry of the girls; the deaths of mothers and
children; and the spectre of free love in Shelley’s ideal of “a
community of like-minded people”.
Polly
Teale’s production, designed by Naomi Dawson in a forest of
packed bookshelves, is a familiar Shared Experience experience, with
its dry ice and falling snow, phantasmagorical dance sequences,
general jumping up and down on a long, scenic dinner table, and
insidious use of sound (Drew Baumohl) and lighting (Chris Davey)
effects.
Kristin
Atherton is a fiery Mary, Flora Nicholson a sweetly reserved Fanny
and Shannon Tarbet a precociously forthright little sister Jane,
with impressive newcomer Ben Lamb as a convincing, if a little too
well-groomed, firebrand poet. Sadie Shimmin is a bustling new Mrs
Godwin, trying to keep up with, or bank down, the non-stop
philosophical and literary chit chat among the family.
And
a special nod for the recently bereaved William Chubb (his wife,
the journalist Cassandra Jardine, died of cancer just over two weeks
ago) who gives a sterling and carefully nuanced performance as the
head of a family electrified with ideas, passion and a sense of its
own importance as legislators of mankind.
