The first thing the Creature does in this production is fail. He is born onto the stage in a jolting, convulsing heap, and then spends what feels like an age learning to lift his head, to control a hand, to stand, and finally to take a single faltering step. There are no words, only a body discovering itself under a canopy of glowing light bulbs, with Underworld’s pulsing electronic score giving it an industrial heartbeat. By the time he managed to stay upright, I was entirely on his side, and the play had barely begun.
I watched the National Theatre’s Frankenstein on the big screen, in an NT Live recording of the 2011 production that has now made its way to South African cinemas. Nick Dear’s adaptation, directed by Danny Boyle, was filmed with Benedict Cumberbatch as the Creature and Jonny Lee Miller as Victor Frankenstein, and the two famously swapped roles on alternate nights. Fifteen years on, the recording still carries the charge of a room full of people holding their breath. I found it fantastic, and I have been turning over what it does to Mary Shelley’s novel ever since.
Whose story is it?
Shelley’s novel is built like a set of nesting dolls. An Arctic explorer, Robert Walton, meets Victor, Victor tells his story, and somewhere in the middle the Creature finally gets to speak. We reach him through other people’s accounts. Dear removes Walton entirely and turns the structure inside out, so that the Creature’s experience is where we begin. We are with him when he is born, and we are with him when Victor looks at what he has made and walks away. In the book, the abandonment is something we hear about. On stage, it happens to us.
That single change shifts the whole moral weather of the story. Victor’s rejection stops looking like the failure of a scientific experiment and starts looking like a parent walking out on a newborn. The Victor of this production is also colder than Shelley’s. The novel gives us a man tormented by guilt, who talks himself in and out of his own responsibility, and that keeps us unsettled about him. Here he is more plainly arrogant and emotionally absent, which pushes us more firmly towards the Creature. I admired how effectively this works, though I did wonder whether some of the book’s ambiguity was traded away a little too readily. Shelley makes us hold sympathy and horror at the same time, and the play occasionally lets us put one of them down. The supporting characters also have less room to breathe, although Karl Johnson’s gentle, blind De Lacey and Naomie Harris’s Elizabeth make the most of what they are given.
The most difficult departure is the scene in which the Creature assaults Elizabeth before killing her. In the novel she is murdered on her wedding night. Adding sexual violence makes the cruelty personal, and it complicates the case for the Creature in a way that feels deliberate. He has been terribly wronged, yet here he does deliberate harm to someone who wronged no one. The production does not look away, and neither does Cumberbatch. It leaves you with a hard question: how far should someone’s suffering shape the way we judge what they do? That is a far more interesting question than deciding which of the two men is the monster.
Then there is the ending, which is where the play parts company with Shelley most boldly. In the novel Victor dies in the Arctic and the Creature vows to end his own life. In the play, neither is given that release. They are left bound together, pursuer and pursued, each unable to exist without the other. Shelley wrote a tragedy of destruction and remorse. This is a tragedy of entanglement, and it makes complete sense of the casting swap. When the same actor can be creator one night and creation the next, the line between the two stops looking so firm. The man who considers himself superior and the being he calls a monster turn out to share isolation, obsession and a gift for destruction.
A body that speaks before he does
I need to say something about Cumberbatch’s physicality, because it was the part of the evening that truly inspired me. His Creature moves like someone whose limbs have not yet been explained to him. Hands curl and splay, the neck twists, the walk lurches, and gradually, with extraordinary control, the movement softens and organises itself as the mind behind it develops. When the Creature is taken in by De Lacey and learns language and literature, the change is beautiful to watch, because we have already seen every stage of it in his body. The cinema recording makes this even more powerful, since the cameras bring you close to a face that is by turns bewildered, hungry for affection and, later, terrifyingly furious.
This is why I came away feeling empathy as well as sympathy. Sympathy is feeling sorry for someone. Empathy is being invited to imagine yourself in his place: brought into existence without consent, abandoned by the person responsible for you, turned away by everyone you meet, with a great capacity for love and nowhere to put it. You can begin to understand how rage grows in that soil. Understanding the origins of his violence does not make it acceptable, and the play never pretends otherwise, but it becomes impossible to believe that violence came from nowhere.
What lingers longest is Victor’s refusal of responsibility. He chooses to create life and then declines everything that follows. That question travels far beyond a Gothic laboratory. We ask it of parents, of institutions, and these days of anyone building powerful new technology: what do we owe the things we bring into the world?
If you can catch one of the final screenings, I would encourage it. It is intense, and some scenes are distressing, so it is not for younger viewers, and the screenings carry a no under 13s restriction. But it is a rare thing, a classic adaptation that argues with its source and leaves you thinking about the novel long after the lights come up.
Frankenstein (NT Live) runs at selected Ster-Kinekor cinemas until the 3rd of November 2026.