Unleashing the darkness

Benedict Cumberbatch as Victor Frankenstein and Jonny Lee Miller as the Creature. Photo / Catherine Ashmore

What: Frankenstein - National Theatre Live
Where and when: Rialto, Newmarket, & Bridgeway, Northcote, from March 31

With the threat of nuclear catastrophe looming over Japan, the cautionary tale of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein couldn't be more relevant. Directed by Slumdog Millionaire/127 Hours' Danny Boyle, the National Theatre's new theatrical adaptation interprets the classic 1831 novel as a parable about the dangers of technology. Featuring Sherlock's Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller (Trainspotting, Dexter) alternating in the dual roles of Victor Frankenstein and the Creature, it has been a sellout success since opening in London last month.

"While I was working on the script, I was very much reminded of Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project," says writer Nick Dear. "Once he knew what was possible with the destructive power of the atom bomb, he wished he could have turned the clock back but of course you can't do that.

"You can't disinvent something; once people get hold of an idea there is no going back. Frankenstein's Creature is a symbol of that."

Boyle and Dear first attempted to adapt the novel for the stage two decades ago but were forced to abandon their plans after the release of Kenneth Branagh's 1994 film Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

"It sat on the shelf for about 10 years," recalls Dear. "The National then approached Danny to do something for them and he said he wanted to do Frankenstein, so we picked it up again. That was in 2004, which gives you some idea of the time scale."

According to Dear, the extended development process has made the story even more prescient.

"The idea of what we do with the things we invent doesn't go away," he says. "As a species, we have a fantastic capacity for leaping forward into the unknown and inventing things, whether it be electricity or cloning genes.

"But our ability to do these things technologically sometimes seems to be in advance of our understanding of the responsibility we have. We leap into the dark and do it without having thought too hard about what it might mean.

"The story of Victor Frankenstein creating this creature is all about that. It all turns rather sour."

Subtitled The Modern Prometheus, Dear describes Frankenstein as a fairytale for grown-ups. "There's an element of magic or fantasy to it because Shelley can't say exactly how Victor brings the Creature to life," he explains. "It's speculative but it essentially asks, 'What are the responsibilities of the scientist once he has given birth to something?"'

The wife of English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, 18-year-old Mary prematurely gave birth to a stillborn baby girl in 1815 before her son William was born in early 1816. Several months later, the couple travelled to Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, where she embarked upon the short story that would eventually become Frankenstein.

"The book is stuffed full of the trauma of forthcoming birth," says Dear. "'What will happen? What will it be like? Will I be able to love it? Will it be a monster?' There's been a lot of feminist criticism in the last 20 years that has addressed the book in terms of what I believe is called a gender narrative, which basically means it could only have been written by a woman. In our stage version, we've very much played up the notion that it's about parenthood; that it's about a father and son relationship. In a strange way, Victor is the parent of his experiment but he doesn't follow through on his responsibility."

Frankenstein and the Creature can also be seen as different aspects of the same personality. "The story in the book is very much a story about doppelgangers or alter egos," says Dear. "It's about how, when you become a father, you see elements of yourself in your child just as you can see elements of yourself in your own father. Making those little connections informed all of that but I'm far too close to it to say whether the audience significantly sees a difference in quality. But I do know people are coming back to see it the other way around if they can get tickets."

Cinema audiences will soon have the opportunity to compare the two actors. Frankenstein was first filmed this month for NT Live with Benedict Cumberbatch as the Creature and Jonny Lee Miller as Victor Frankenstein. The pair then swapped roles for an encore performance last week. "It was Danny's idea originally and I thought it would be terrific if we could convince them to do it," says Dear. "It turned out to be very significant in how we advertised and proposed the story to the public, who know coming into the theatre that this is done on a very human scale.

"We don't have an eight-foot [2.4m] freak in the show so we didn't have to cast somebody who looked odd or monster-like. The essential idea of the show is not what does it mean to be a monster but what does it mean to be human?"