JAMIE BRITTON recommends that we all buy at least two copies of a remarkable book of poems
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Frankenstein, Southwark Playhouse London
Ingenious updating of Mary Shelley's gothic masterpiece is a technological triumph
Excellent: Ella Dacres and Sarah Lusack
[Helen-Murray]
MARIA DUARTE goes down a bilingual rabbit hole with an impressive Jodie Foster
DAVID HARVIE recommends a selection of Harry Cleaver’s writing that documents working-class activism and offers a method, and a way of understanding and investigating the world
DAVID YEARSLEY is fascinated by the account of four composers who transformed their experiences of the second world war and the Holocaust into deeply moving works of art
PETER MASON thrills to the sound of south London-born Yussef Dayes, and the galaxy of musicians drawn into his orbit
From post-human revolution in Puerto Rico to trans poetics and queer mythmaking, these three books that imagine new ways of being together
THE National Youth Theatre’s Frankenstein opens with Sonny Poon Tip’s Garth standing on stage and telling the audience that, “like fax machines,” virtual reality will soon make actual theatres obsolete.
It’s a gutsy claim but then everything about this production is robust, from the performances of the National Youth Theatre’s young actors to the radical edit of Mary Shelley’s two-centuries-old novel.
Technology is at the heart of Carl Miller’s adaptation, in which Frankenstein’s monster (Sarah Lusack) is AI and, in an excellent sequence, the audience experience the action through VR headsets.
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