Creature Ascending

It gives me great pleasure to confirm that, next month, I will finally get round to being Frankenstein’s Creature. The show will play six performances at Theatre503 in Battersea, running from the 25th to the 29th of August (with a matinee on the 29th). The production is in the care of Dippermouth, the company behind the sumptuous mounting of Scrooge & Marley in 2013 (click for photo evidence). They’ve already crafted an excellent show blurb and press release, in addition to a beautifully gruesome publicity image. With a support network like this, I need only learn the odd line and stand under a big light.

The show’s been a long time coming. I wrote the bulk of Frankenstein’s Creature almost three years ago, when Sikes & Nancy was in its infancy. I’d then performed Sikes a mere six times, and felt pretty sure I’d gotten the fullest use from it (well, that feeling’s long gone). Frankenstein’s Creature represents a development from Dickens: as well as embodying a universe on the stage, I am now that universe’s author. I’ve somewhat tempered my hubris by keeping to the framework of Mary Shelley’s novel. I don’t care for reckless invention when there’s unplumbed richness in the original. I prefer for new details to introduce themselves. Happily enough, they did. Although the script is faithful to Shelley’s spirit – or so I believe – there’s not a single sentence from her novel there. By now, the script feels like it was written by someone else again. This should prove healthy in rehearsal.

Frankenstein’s Creature is informed by my early relationship with Sikes & Nancy in another way. It’s full of unbridled confidence – a confidence I don’t have in the same pure form now. This is clearest in the relish which this new play embraces transformation: incarnating that otherworldly character for over an hour. In the past, transformation has been my ideal in acting. Thus the frantic monopolyloguing; the commitment to grotesquerie; the not infrequent gender-swapping – and Sikes & Nancy included all of these. Yet I’ve started to question transformation in recent years. Paradoxically, this comes from having given Sikes & Nancy so very much. I’m coming to terms with the physical and vocal toll this sort of acting takes. In my case, transformative acting leads to endless paranoid questionings – questionings which reductively carry me back into myself. Am I vocally incompetent? I am prone to losing various bits of my voice (or convincing myself I have, which comes to the same) – but then, I attempt very ambitious things with my voice. I’ve never considered it terribly expressive, so I’ve tried to wrench more from it than is healthy. Am I physically overdeveloped? I don’t always have a sure grip on how my face is moving these days – the muscles have, if anything, grown too responsive. This is worrisome given that my physical presence is one of natural exaggeration. As Peter Ustinov said of Charles Laughton: ‘When Laughton was sitting quietly in a chair, not speaking, he was doing too much.’

All this is underlined by the dawning recognition that I am, after all, physically and vocally limited – because I’m so distinctive. A transformative actor must start with a blanker slate. Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman are transformative actors; Judi Dench and Christopher Lee (God rest him) are not. Distinctiveness needn’t cripple me: it’s what my great hero, Henry Irving, had going for him in spades. So perhaps these worries stem from a more fundamental discomfort with self. The late Roger Rees – what a loss – had this to say on self-consciousness in acting, back in 1983:

I am embracing a fear. When I was a boy I found it hard to throw myself wholeheartedly into things because I was even then an observer. I watched. And I find now that if I have to do anything extremely physical or frightening on the stage, I am able to stand completely outside myself, really look at myself, almost see myself from the back of the auditorium. And I hate it. It makes me feel po-faced and unadventurous; and that’s why sometimes I do physical things which are quite wrong, quite embarrassing; but I have to do them just for my sake. It’s me fighting against myself, and I think that’s what acting is about.

It’s true of a lot of actors layer their work from a fear of being boring. My person is naturally distinctive, expansive, requiring little embellishment to become overwhelming. And yet I do assume I’m boring an audience most of the time. A knotty problem. So: rather than waste my energies in ‘fighting against myself’ (in my case, beating myself up), it makes sense to gravitate towards outsize characters, for which I don’t have to squash down these embarrassing bits of myself. The Creature is therefore a gift. I am feeling my way to a greater simplicity. But I’m sure that the journey will last a lifetime. I only hope Roger Rees departed at a point when he felt satisfied.

In certain respects, the Creature is a character that demands transformation. On a base physical level, certainly: a cheat to do it without some elaborate makeup. But psychologically and emotionally, I’m discovering (rediscovering?) that my script is concerned more with enmeshment. Our desire to become one with other people; the terror of it. As is abundantly clear, this sets off unnerving vibrations for me as an actor. But it’s also the most purely human experience: that difficulty in giving ourselves over to other human beings (‘The Rose’ by Amanda McBroom: ‘It’s the one who won’t be taken, who cannot seem to give’). In life, the best answer lies in becoming more comfortable with oneself. It’s not easy. It takes time. I’m not quite there yet (who is?), though I’m as close as I’ve ever been. This should be an acting transformation tempered with simplicity then; even a lightness.

For this Creature is all lightness, a total divergence from filmic stereotypes. (By no means the same thing as filmic reality: Karloff’s Monster is towering in its simplicity.) This Creature is a hypersensitive, even narcissistic being: like some blithering Romantic poet, his tragedy may be that of someone who feels everything too acutely. There should be a tapered, wispy elegance about him; a Creature composed from air. I am not, by nature, a light actor. ‘Lightness, quickness, ease’ became my mantra in playing Sikes & Nancy at Trafalgar Studios. I did the best I could, but I still felt hampered by my natural equipment: bass voice, slack diction, a body wiry and bony, a tendency to elongation. I was born for the heavy. All the more reason to chase lightness then: it could prove a most helpful tension for the Creature.

Yet despite its airy aspiration, Frankenstein’s Creature remains a chance to revel in the mud and the muck. The script pushes forth a character who is, in most respects, sickening: a life story in which iniquity and perversity are persistently framed as beauty. Or is it the other way around? We read Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis with compassion nowadays; if anything, with too much compassion. Yet had the letter fallen into the hands of Wilde’s persecutors, it would have been regarded like a tract from Jimmy Savile.

Wilde and Savile both had the gift of insinuating themselves into society. Not so the Creature. He is the ultimate outsider. Is this a figure who can understand or meaningfully want humanity? We so often want to complete the Beast with a Beauty. But, as I learned when playing Quasimodo, this may go no further than a fairytale. The Beast stands alone. And perhaps he goes further still, embracing his ugliness as superior. The undesirable parading their most undesirable characteristic as radiant – this is the purest definition of the grotesque I know. Wilde represented boy-love as a superior love, founded on the Greeks. In our own time, a number of pedophiles have attempted a similar defence. I don’t see how pedophilia could ever be legitimised (‘consent’ being the watchword); nevertheless, more effort should be made to understand the impulse. The Creature should encourage people to look away. But we must feel compelled to probe his mystery.

In short, I feel ready for Frankenstein’s Creature. As ready as I ever will: the man and the moment are converging. The result should, at any rate, be interesting. Not that a fixed result is the aim here: I very much hope the show will have a life beyond this initial showing. And perhaps, in creating my Creature, I’ll go some way towards recreating myself as an actor. But to hell with overworked metaphors: book your tickets at once for Theatre503. There are 100 tickets at £10 for those under twenty-six. Capitalise on your youth and beauty; the Creature would have it no other way.