The horrid, the sublime

At long last, I got to see a broadcast of Danny Boyle's Frankenstein from the National Theatre in London—the spectacular one, in which Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller played creator and created, turn and turn about each night.

The audience was full of psyched-up Sherlockians, all young and squeeful.  One had come from Maine.  Another, a dark boy in an Evangelion T-shirt, lectured atonally; just before the light went down, he asked the universe in general, loudly, how they had solved Reichenbach Falls.  And the one next to me said she was passionate about the theatre and had just graduated the Conservatory.  I asked what had drawn her to the stage, and she said that she had made her debut at four in Madama Butterfly!  (Her mother, who was something backstage in ballet, brought her in at the last moment:  the little boy they'd cast had to be carried off terror-stricken.)  She remembers how her blonde wig itched; she remembers kneeling, pins-and-needles, gazing up at the source of the astounding noise:  a woman streaming sweat and sound and makeup.  The diva curved her hands round the child's head, as if to shield her from the shock of music.  It was baptism in the theatre:   full immersion.

Lights.

We got Jonny Lee Miller as the Creature and Benedict Cumberbatch as Frankenstein. 

Visually, the thing's astounding:  lightnings, embryonic webs of blood, a rain of gold light like the tatters of a galaxy.  There's a dazing vision of a train, uncomprehended:  like steampunk by Hieronymus Bosch.  And the Creature's uncompleted Bride is beautiful:  a goddess stitched of carrion.

This play is all the Creature's.

His scenes of origin are stunning:  how he twitches, writhes, rocks, staggers; how he tastes light, sees birdsong, tears at grass.  He mates ecstatically with rain.  He is raw, a welted Caliban; and for a time, his island is his own.  Not Eden:  but an interlude between hells.

The scenes with his old blind Chiron were bittersweet:  I knew what lay beyond.   They kept the philosophy, and swathes of Milton, which the Creature knew by heart.  Aww.  And then the next betrayal, fire, and flight.

And Frankenstein:  who is cold.  All as expected:  obsessive, overweening, driven, twitchy, vaunting, inhumane.  When he comes up against Elizabeth, he bumps away like a Roomba.  I wanted him to have some unexpected quirk or oddity, but he's even as a cogwheel.  Beautifully played, mind you, and he does lovely things with his eyebrows and his Caspar David Friedrich coattails.

After that, it's chase and treachery, a wedding promised and denied; a wedding violated.

It gets brutal.

It ends with an infinite journey northward, hell-yoked, into the white.  The left stump of darkness.

Nine