Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein begins on the wet summer night when a teenage writer was dared to invent a ghost story, and then lets the story she invented take over the room. Victor Frankenstein builds a man out of dead material, succeeds, and runs from what he has made.

The adaptation runs the novel and its author's life together. The creature is articulate, abandoned and increasingly unwilling to be left alone; Victor is brilliant and morally absent; and behind both of them stands Mary Shelley, who had lost a child and wrote this. The pursuit moves from a laboratory to the ice, and the question of which of the two is the monster is left open rather than answered.

David Catlin adapted the play from Mary Shelley's 1818 novel, and it was first staged in 2016. It is written for a small ensemble, with the creation, the chase and the deaths performed physically rather than described, and it treats the novel's frame — a story told to a stranger — as part of the theatrical machinery.

The tone is gothic and unusually physical. Bodies are lifted, dropped and suspended, and the horror arrives through what the company does with its own weight rather than through effects. Under the shocks the play keeps asking a very plain question about responsibility: what you owe a thing you have brought into the world.

It suits audiences who want horror with an argument attached. It works best live, where a room flinching in the dark at the same instant is precisely the effect the writing is built for.