Mary Shelley

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.