Playwright Jess Sayer's "Mary: The Birth of Frankenstein" fuses fiction with a backbone of fact. Photo / Andi Crown
In a blood-soaked tribute to the 19th-century teen sensation who brought Frankenstein’s monster into being, playwright Jess Sayer lets loose a few monsters of her own.
We should all be obsessed with Mary Shelley. I am – I’ve spent the past seven years writing a play about her. Her life is both fascinating and tragic, and I still feel as though I’ve barely scratched the surface.
At 18, Mary began to write her first novel: Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, a sci-fi/Gothic novel where man appropriates God. First published anonymously in 1818, Frankenstein would have a lasting impact, entering into the English literary canon and remaining both as horrifying and poignant today as it was then.
When I was 18, my idea of rebellion was buying packets of Squiggles from the dairy by my uni accommodation because I’d just moved out of home and no one could tell me what to do anymore.
Mary started Frankenstein in 1816, a time when the world was barely beyond the era of executing women – sorry, “witches” – and women were considered incapable of directing their own lives.
1816 was dubbed “The Year Without a Summer” or “Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death” after the 1815 eruption of Mt Tambora in Indonesia triggered global cooling, crop failures and widespread famine.
In Europe that year, “summer” is dark and cold and awful. The Napoleonic wars have just devastated France and the young Mary Godwin – all heavy dresses and no rights – has just arrived in Geneva, Switzerland, with her lover (and future husband), Percy Bysshe Shelley.
They spend the next three months frequenting the Villa Diodati with Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont, to visit the mad, bad and dangerous poet Lord George Byron and his personal physician, John Polidori.
Because the weather is so awful – terrific thunderstorms and perpetual rain – this group of genius literati is trapped inside with nothing to do. They spend the dark days and nights imbibing, talking about the principles of life and galvanism (the 19th-century theory that electric currents could create life), reading poetry and scaring each other with ghost stories. Then Lord Byron sets a challenge: Let’s all write a horror story of our own.
Inspired, Mary comes up with the genesis of Frankenstein. Lord Byron and John Polidori focus on “vampyres”, leading to Polidori’s The Vampyre – published in 1819 and considered to be the progenitor of the modern romantic vampire genre.
By the time she attends this gathering, Mary has lived more than her years. Her mother (certified badass and proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft) died when Mary was around 11 days old, because we didn’t know about germs and hand washing yet. So, Mary basically grew up thinking she’d killed her own mother.
In a bold parenting move by dad (William Godwin, philosopher), she learned to spell and write her name using her mother’s gravestone.
Things only escalated from there – she fell in love with Shelley (a married poet) and got disowned because of it, ran away, lived abroad, was in dire financial straits and on the run from creditors, had a baby and lost a baby – all by the tender age of, let me repeat, 18.
Having seen and felt so much of life, it’s almost not surprising that when Lord Byron set his challenge, Mary Shelley responded with Frankenstein.
It’s a story about birth and creation; about rejection, being unmothered and unloved. A story that warns us about prejudice; warns us that we must create responsibly and take responsibility for those creations.
Two hundred and nine years later, those warnings are as loud and urgent as ever.
Trying to condense all I’ve learned about Mary Shelley into a two-ish hour play has been a wild challenge, one I’ve baulked at more than once. How do you crush the life of a woman that brilliant into 104 pages?
So Mary: The Birth of Frankenstein is a snapshot; a fragment. It reimagines that dark and stormy Geneva summer over one night, fusing fiction with a backbone of fact. It’s about a young woman finding her voice in a time when women weren’t supposed to have one.
It’s about creation, and how bloody and violent it can be. It’s about rebellion and words and writers; about sexual politics and grief and motherhood.
It’s about a woman being furious and destructive, letting her rage and pain take physical form.
Monsters are not born, Mary said. They are created. In this play, I’ve created a few ... I hope you come and see them let loose.