Cloning Mary Shelley
Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Group: SPID LynchPin Productions, Pleasance Theatre

James Gledhill

Cloning Mary Shelley has cloning and Mary Shelley and many other things besides. Occasionally they were even brought into a halfway interesting relationship with each other. For the most part though it's left to the audience to play the role of Victor Frankenstein, assembling the component parts and attempting to infuse them with an animating principle. For while the creators of this production may not have given birth to a monster, their creation certainly isn't sufficiently developed to be let out to make its way in the world.

This is one woman's exploration of the significance of Mary Shelley to her life and to contemporary culture. She's obviously read lots of books, the stage is strewn with volumes relating to Mary Shelley and there's copious evidence of other research. The audience is bombarded with biographical information about the author, the circumstances surrounding the conception of Frankenstein, about cloning, creation myths and scientific research. As the blurb says there's also 'turning 40, origami, making choices and making babies', as if sheer variety itself was some sort of recommendation. It's all presented in an unfiltered and haphazard fashion with little direction to it and no idea of how it all coheres. The squirm-inducing didactic scene about cloning ('genes, and no I'm not talking about Levis), delivered, for what reason it remains unclear, in a German accent is crow-barred into the centre of the play. Mr and Mrs potato head served to illustrate the three types of cloning, and the two sides of the cloning debate are simply presented via readings from newspaper cuttings. There's no sense of how these disparate elements serve to illuminate one another and the connections as there are can be superficially profound they turn out to be largely empty. The performance, while largely competent, is somewhat mannered and overly self-indulgent

The most interesting aspect of the work is its meditation on the nature of creation, the circumstances in which creation takes place, our attempts to control the creative process and how creations can take on a life of their own. A woman's choice not to have children is juxtaposed with Mary Shelley's loss of two young children and her desire to create a legacy of her husband's poems for her surviving son Percy. Literary works are presented as one's progeny. The play closes with Mary Shelley's observation that 'without a metaphor I cannot live'. Unfortunately the creator of this work hasn't found a metaphor to interestingly reinterpret her life. This creation certainly doesn't take on a life of its own, remaining far less than the sum of its parts.

1 July to 25 August.

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