The story is cult: a natural science student decides to create a human being. He studies, kills animals, and retrieves anatomical parts from corpses. The experiment is an unexpected success: the Creature is born, beautiful and strong. Its creator, however, despairs. He is afraid of it. Why? This is the real mystery of the novel: why does Frankenstein react the way he does, why is he not proud of his work? We discover that the author, Mary Shelley, is not entirely comfortable with it either. Indeed, throughout her life she denies and downplays the literary scope of her work and her interest in it. She should be delighted with the masterpiece she created and instead does everything in her power to belittle its motherhood.
The answer? The Creature is the Book. The play is an original reversal of the way we look at Mary Shelley's work and her disturbing creation. This production tells of a time when being a woman and an artist could be a serious problem, when one could feel "monstrous" if one gave birth to books instead of children or cohabited with a man instead of marrying him. It tells of a time when a Creatrix fears the genius of her Creature and is forced to justify the magnitude of her ambitions. Between wireless headsets, virtual settings, real actors and holographic avatars with interactive dramaturgical elements, the show is a dreamlike journey into the novel and, at the same time, into the emotionality of its author, who confuses herself with Dr. Frankenstein, the Creature with the Work and the characters with memories.


The performance is guest of PlayOn! – International Theatre Festival for Youth together with other shows created within the European project PLAYON! – New Storytelling with Immersive Technologies dedicated to the theme “Concrete Utopias in the Digital Age”, in which Elsinor is the only Italian partner.
Frankenstein takes in video components and holograms, and an immersive audio system every spectator can enjoy thanks to wireless headphones. On stage, an innovative microphone in the shape of a human head, the Binaural Dummy Head, reproduces the sound at 360°, with extraordinary effects of immersive realism.
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