Gods And Monsters
By Russell Labey
Based on the novel Father Of Frankenstein by Christopher Bram
The Artful Dodger
Two months have gone by since you last heard from TLT, your glamorous
theatre spy, and her ruby red limousine.
Now she has to confess, after previously infiltrating the theatrical world
anonymously, she has broken cover and accepted a Press Night ticket for this newly-adapted
play Gods and Monsters.
The novel Father of Frankenstein, already made into a successful film, and the
current Gods and Monsters’ play, directed by adapter Russell Labey, charts the final days in the life of openly gay
Frankenstein movie director James Whale (an affecting and effective
performance by Ian Gelder).
Born British and working-class, after attending art school he reinvented himself first as World War I army officer, then as theatre director and eventually double-edged success at Universal Pictures in the 1930s as a movie director, whose toolbox included German Expressionism.
Born British and working-class, after attending art school he reinvented himself first as World War I army officer, then as theatre director and eventually double-edged success at Universal Pictures in the 1930s as a movie director, whose toolbox included German Expressionism.
Following his Hollywood hits and technical innovations
including a cutting-edge 360° panning camera shot in musical Showboat starring Paul Robeson, he nevertheless found himself caught up in studio and world
politics and sidelined, retiring in 1941.
.
By 1957, the turmoil resulting from several strokes, dependence on prescription drugs for
sleeping and waking and even, gallingly, being pigeonholed as solely a horror movie director, had taken its toll on Whale. The play presents an increasingly
fragmented world through his eyes and physical symptoms, alongside the mixed solace of his later years, his painting.
Finally, he apparently
took his own life, knocking himself out in the swimming pool of his Hollywood home and drowning, little knowing his movies would soon have a new lease of life on the new mass medium of television
Often with the feel of a monologue interrupted and resuming,
the character of Whale has its main foils in a Hispanic housekeeper (Lachele Carl
making the most of her intermittent appearances), an ambitious fey young horror
movie buff chasing his hero for an interview (Joey Phillips) and, as if
stepping out of the pages of an Americanized E M Forster or D H Lawrence
novel, the heterosexual gardener Clayton
Boone (Will Austin), reluctantly baring his nude torso to pose for Whale’s art –
and finding himself the object of the older man’s desires. The play also includes Grecian-statue-style male nudity and strobe lighting.
A lengthy first act
of an hour and ten minutes has a
tendency to bare its own musculature and insert exposition a little self-consciously, also shoehorning in a somewhat formulaic Cold War subtext.
Yet, despite a few longeurs in this diffuse play, the much shorter second act with dynamic visuals - projections by Louise Rhoades-Brown - and sound design/score by John Chambers, bringing visceral depth,
constructs something more original out of the celluloid context, using Whale’s true-life
history, art and sketching and a repertoire of movie clichés to interrogate itself. An
amber light for new light on a tale of classic old Hollywood.
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