Olivier; Donmar; Barbican, all London
In the centre of the Olivier stage is a pale disc like an enormous seed pod. Within it you can just make out a shadowy figure. It pulses, and the theatre reverberates to the beat of a heart. Serried ranks of bare bulbs sizzle, dip and flare, and out of the pod rips a pink, blotched, raw thing whose naked limbs have gone all wrong, as if they've been attached back to front: it slips around the stage in judders, as if it were allergic to the ground on which it has fallen. On one night that thing is Jonny Lee Miller; on the next, it is Benedict Cumberbatch.
The undoubted hit (real people, not just relatives and backers are up on their feet night after night at curtain call) that is Danny Boyle's production of Frankenstein depends on a gorgeously gargantuan feat of design by Mark Tildesley, and on the most magnetic pairing of actors' roles since Olivier and Gielgud played Romeo and Mercutio in tandem 76 years ago. It is not just an ingenious, and commercial, idea to make Cumberbatch and Miller alternate in the roles of Frankenstein and his creature: it goes to the essence of the story. Mary Shelley's 1818 novel ? in which an Enlightenment scientist entangles himself with dark arts, creates a man, and is appalled at the result ? says that monsters are not born but made, and that it is ill-treatment that deforms a character. In Shelley's book the most kindly of people can appear for a moment monstrous. Boyle's production makes this clear in almost Shakespearean rhetoric: the creator or the creation, who sins most?
And who acts best? Well, they sustain each other. Miller (more obvious casting for the creature) actually brings a particular zeal to the scientist ? which is important, as Nick Dear's script is monster-oriented to the point of drowning out the notion of experimental excitement. As the Creature, Cumberbatch is more ludic, Miller more threatening, but in that role both of them combine yowling diction with precise utterance and a wild, staggering gait with dainty gestures: it is as if they were St Vitus dancers performing a gavotte, and Touretters delivering tongue-twisters.
The real strength of Frankenstein, a stark, Beckett-like, master-and-slave confrontation that takes on epic dimensions, is evident when there's just the three of them ? Cumberbatch, Miller and Tildesley's design ? on stage. The two outsiders circle each other in a vast, abstract grey-green landscape overhung by a massive moon. The Creature, huddled in a red robe, flies across a railway track, as a steam engine ? a fragment of satanic mills come to life ? roars towards the audience, scattering sparks and smoke and gigantic shadows, with goggled-up dark figures, the creatures of industry, clinging to its sides. Tildesley's exuberant engineering is not above swagger and showmanship: that chandelier, and the bell hanging over the stalls (there's an interest in watching which spectators pull the rope as they walk down the aisle) are so prominent that if we weren't at the National the words "Andrew Lloyd Webber" might be murmured.
Words aren't the monster's medium. And, given that in this adaptation the story is his, not his maker's, that is just as well. Dear's script is undernourished. Few will object to his getting rid of the guff clogging up Mary Shelley's opening chapters: PB Shelley, who is supposed to have edited the manuscript, could have been more exigent. But what Dear supplies as dialogue is meagre, with the result that the background domestic scenes are starved of interest and plausibility. Even the skill and ease of Naomie Harris and Ella Smith (who is obliged to say of her Frankenmeister: "Well, he has always been peculiar") can't surmount this. Boyle has had his eye but not his ear on the job. Rip out the non-monster-master scenes, turn the rest of the dialogue into reported speech and make the play into a two-hander, and he would have directed not only a thrilling phenomenon but a work of art.
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is bouncy, screechy, schmaltzy, quick on the draw, heavy on some overweight feet, garishly coloured, niftily rhymed, sassy and confrontational. And it's a musical: music and lyrics by William Finn, book by Rachel Sheinkin, conceived by Rebecca Feldman. This is America, and American theatre, in cartoon miniature. The children (full-size adults in short trousers and frou-frou skirts) who compete for lexical supremacy include an overachieving Asian Catholic popsie ? she (hello, tiger mother) knows six languages, plays the sax and piano and does the splits and a ribbon dance ? and a lost girl, in pastel pink with a cuddly rucksack and an inability to hold her head up whose absent mother sends her waves of woolly love from an ashram.
Jamie Lloyd's well-pitched production snaps together the often good rhymes ("exuberance" and "protuberance" do nicely for a boy with an erection) and makes the most of the fetching tunes. It also embraces the idea of embarrassing compulsory participation. This bee has a sting. Christopher Oram has made a school gym in the Donmar: the audience sit on brightly coloured tip-up chairs, a basketball hoop hangs over the action. On press night the critics were given the extra treat of seeing one of our own ? the verbally voracious Henry Hitchings from the Evening Standard ? summoned to the stage. Required to spell "telepathy", he exercised his right to ask for a definition. The judge simply looked at him, wordlessly: Hitchings, of course, knew what he meant.
When I saw Robert Lepage's The Blue Dragon two years ago at the Dublin festival, it seemed visually luxuriant and verbally skinny. The dialogue has sharpened up but it hasn't changed much. The slides from symbol to actuality are magical: Lepage traces an ideogram on a pad, which appears, beautifully blown up on a screen, and is embodied by a dancer who whirls across the stage like a leaf in the wind. The shifts in scale ? from miniature train to a shadow dance of commuters ? are seamless. There are some good jokes: a venerable, bearded Chinese sage looms up on a video, and is revealed to be the face of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Yet, the plot is still too schematic, and the dialogue often robotically executed. It is time for this multimedia wizard to turn another Lepage.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/feb/27/frankenstein-danny-boyle-cumberbatch-miller
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