Haunting the Stage: Danny Boyle's Frankenstein and the Gothic Drama of Modern Subjectivity 13 December 2013

Haunting the Stage: Danny Boyle’s Frankenstein and the Gothic Drama of Modern Subjectivity 13 December 2013 Osborne 1 Introduction: Positioning the Gothic in Modern Life Recent critical literary interests in Gothic narratives and mythologies have made it so that the Gothic itself has become almost inseparable from modern and postmodern literary genealogies. From Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Gothic traces are often found in modern and postmodern texts, lingering somewhere between the shadows and the unspoken. Thus literary critics have made efforts to theorize the Gothic on “a continuum with such twentieth-century movements as ‘high’ modernism and surrealism” (Hurley 129-30) and conceding that traditional Gothic terms have been renegotiated in the modern period to operate as technologies that conjure up anxieties found within the modern self (Spooner 40). In a review of Edith Birkhead’s The Tale of Terror (1921), Virginia Woolf comments on her modern contemporaries writing, “It is at the ghosts within that we shudder, and not at the decaying bodies of barons or the subterranean activities of ghouls” (307). What Woolf highlights is “a modernist understanding of the Gothic as interior drama rather than dramatic spectacle,” (Spooner 39) making the line that has historically been drawn between Gothic and modern texts essentially disappear. Just as literary critics find it difficult to demarcate literary periods from each other, defining what Gothic is proves to be equally, if not more difficult. It is obvious that specific tropes found in texts that have been traditionally understood to be Gothic are often considered undisputedly Gothic. For instance, with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus (1818; revised 1831) or Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), one can imagine the particularities of these texts and accept them as examples of the Gothic. However, it is too simplistic to define the Gothic as the presence of horror, fantastical Osborne 2 creatures, or castles on darkened hills. Gothic narratives suggest complexity and like other literary genres, offer a serious engagement with the political, culture, and humanity; these engagements usually involve the “transgression of natural and moral laws, aesthetic rules and social taboos” (Botting 1). When explored, Gothic elements and engagements can be found within vast amounts of nineteenth and twentieth century texts (or 1880 to the present to be more specific), and therefore illustrate the extent to which “the Gothic and Modernism influence each other and share certain developments” (Riquelme 587). This means that both Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein can be read as displays of and commentary on contemporary life and anxieties, anxieties specific to the modern period, that in the case of Frankenstein, are arguably reinscribed through its many adaptions both on screen and in theatre. To think about the Gothic, modernism, and postmodernism, within the context of Shelley’s Frankenstein is to think about the development of modern subjectivity and the social alienation that this development bred. The Gothic in this equation then, is found through its relation to the modern and postmodern. Principally this paper will investigate Danny Boyle’s Frankenstein (2011) as a cultural product arguing that the production reinscribes Frankenstein’s mythology within radical modern and postmodern experiences of instability and alienation. For its uses in this paper, the term “text” is understood broadly to incorporate theatre, supporting and furthering the notion that in the modern period, one is immersed and constituted by text. Literary and philosophical conceptualizations of the Gothic, the modern, and the postmodern are primarily utilized in this paper to inform the theatrical and acknowledge Osborne 3 the extent to which Boyle’s play reworks Shelley’s Frankenstein to be a Gothic drama of the modern and postmodern self. Danny Boyle’s Frankenstein, Mythology, and Modern Imaginings Danny Boyle’s Frankenstein was first presented on the Olivier Stage of the National Theatre, London, on February 2011 (Dear 1). Boyle directed the play, with a stage adaption written by Nick Dear. The production stars British actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller who play both The Creature and Victor Frankenstein respectively. The play opened to packed theatres (Tiehan 71) and in 2012 won Cumberbatch and Miller the Olivier Award for Best Actor, making the excitement surrounding this new rendition indicative of a deep cultural investment with the mythology of Frankenstein. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has existed within Western modern imagination for quite some time. Originally written in 1818 and given two titles, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, it is usually interpreted and understood as a modern creation story that replaces God with science (Tiehan 47; Dear 2011). Due to the rapid technological advances that characterize the modern period, it is clear that one of the cultural anxieties of Shelley’s time was the death of God and its outcome, the emergence of man as ruler over the natural world. The source of Frankenstein’s modernity can be cited as the fact that “there is no divine source for the rules, no final moral answer, no divine authority to judge, punish, or reward” (Hitchcock 6). However, as Tiehan suggests, labeling Frankenstein as a simple creation myth erases its complexity and its mythology in terms of its politics and cultural critique (44). Osborne 4 Frankenstein is likewise understood as symbolizing a collective fear of progress (Tiehan 44). With the consequences of Victor’s unbridled scientific innovation taking the form of a monster, Frankenstein becomes a text that does the cultural work of a cautionary tale; retold for modern ears apprehensive about the value of stem cell research or the reliance on computers. But this interpretation is also simplistic, taking for granted and or naturalizing the specific procedures of modernity itself that recast the modern identity as decidedly masculine, rational, and individualized. There is no doubt that the above interpretations of Frankenstein’s mythology circulate throughout the nearly countless adaptions of the novel for theatre, film, and television; however, it is clear that Dear’s adaption involves a deeper signification as it reflects the modern subject back onto his or her self. In an interview with The National Theatre, Nick Dear states that he and Boyle specifically wanted to tell the story from The Creature’s point of view. Both the moment of creation and nearly the first half of the play center The Creature and his quest to find his creator. “We do start with the moment of creation, but not told from the perspective of the scientist, which is how it’s usually told. We tell it from the perspective of the experiment, rather than the experimenter” (Interview 2011). Boyle and Dear also wanted The Creature to have a voice (he literally uses language), which had been stripped from him in almost all of the other adaptions. Not only is this centering of The Creature more loyal to Shelley’s novel, but it also illustrates the extent to which the production captivates a modern world indebted to claims of marginality and disempowerment. The relationship between The Creature and Frankenstein is also emphasized in Dear’s adaption (Tiehan 73). Casting Victor as a young man rather than as a middle-aged Osborne 5 scientist as he is in many other renditions made it possible to see both Victor and The Creature as sharing a level of immaturity about their world; however, The Creature’s immaturity is largely predicated on his dislocatedness from his creator as opposed to Victor’s obvious egotism. The Creature and Victor’s relationship is also deepened through the actors’ alternating roles. This creative mechanic operates both within the confines of play and as the play’s metanarrative. In an interview that the National Theatre previewed before the encore screenings, both actors discuss the various ways in which their individual performances of each role would “spill” over and into each other (Tiehan 93). In other words, each subsequent performance made one actor’s interpretation of Victor spill more and more into his interpretation of The Creature and vice versa. One could argue that this created a dynamic between and within the actors that allowed for the perception that these two characters were much closer than one would believe. As a metanarrative, the idea that there was an element of similarity, perhaps sameness, between The Creature and Victor can be found in the National Theatre’s promotional posters1 and trailers. Image effects that leave Cumberbatch and Miller as either The Creature or Victor appearing to unite into one figure or a trailer that overlays Cumberbatch and Miller’s voices as they recite their lines for both roles together make it as if The Creature and Victor represent one persona that is divided. “We can only go forward. We can never go back.” Forming Modern Subjectivity: The Self in Dark Modernity The Gothic imaginary is usually in the service of bringing forth the “dark side of modernity” (Botting 2), that is the anxieties associated with scientific advances, social 1 See attached packet of images Osborne 6 change, racialization, and nationalism which traditionally characterize modernity. Boyle’s Frankenstein captures this “dark side” through its display of modernity as primarily an internal experience that more often than not leaves the experiencing subject lost in a world they have struggled to know or ambitiously tried to master. In other words, with its bare bones stage designs and costumes, Boyle’s production centralizes The Creature and Victor in ways that dramatize the struggle of modern and postmodern subjectivity to either rectify or celebrate his or her epistemological alienation in a godless world. More specifically, The Creature and Victor represent two separate but ultimately imbricated experiences of modernity, that of desiring or having to be God (of oneself over nature) and alienation from industrial society.

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