Frankenstein

Creator mania and God complex and a thunderstorm in between.

The 18-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin flees to the continent with her lover, the still-married poet and revolutionary Percy Shelley, and their child to escape the social ostracism of London society. On Lake Geneva, they meet the notoriously famous poet Lord Byron and spend the summer together.

Whereby: the summer fails. It is the cold year of 1816, the climatic consequence of a volcanic eruption in Indonesia. So is it because of the bad weather that the young, talented people are sitting inside and calling a writing competition so that the best ghost story can win? Or the consumption of laudanum plus horror stories? Or in the conversations about somnambulism, about the latest scientific experiments (dead bodies brought back to life with electricity!), about the relationship between biology and religion (matter beats soul, or was it the other way round?).

The fact is: this is where the first ideas for the novel Frankenstein were born. This is where the mythical battle begins between the scientist Victor Frankenstein and his assembled creature, who, having just come to life, is rejected by him and henceforth pursues him, demanding her right to love at the cost of a few deaths.

And: this is where the pioneering author Mary Shelley enters the literary stage, where a young female voice conquers artistic space. Her first novel: today cult and myth, pop culture and epochal signature.

In Tom Schneider's production, the stage becomes Mary Shelley's "room to herself", loosely based on Virginia Woolf, a space for creation, a workshop, a studio. The actress and visual artist Karin Moog creates an elaborately designed visual world in which Mary Shelley searches for a story with Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, Victor Frankenstein and his monster and finds immortality.