And now for something completely different: I’ve been tempted to lead at least a dozen reviews with that time-worn Monty Python reference, but always reconsidered. This time, though, I can’t resist.
The play in question is called—drumroll, please—Frankenstein’s Monster is Drunk and the Sheep have all Jumped the Fences, with the first letters of “have” and “all” deliberately not capitalized. The title, grammatical quirks and all, may suggest a concept album by a particularly ostentatious indie rock band; the work, happily, is a delightfully goofy and unexpectedly touching lark, written and directed by Zoë Seaton.
As cofounder and artistic director of Northern Ireland’s Big Telly Theatre Company, Seaton has overseen, according to the company’s site, “site-specific, immersive games and participatory community-driven projects,” both at home and internationally. Frankenstein’s Monster, a 65-minute piece adapted from Owen Booth’s short story—I suppose he can take credit or blame for the title, though his punctuation was a bit different—won praise at last year’s Belfast International Arts Festival, and it arrives here with regional accents and charm fully intact.
The story begins in 1946, with the titular creature frozen in a glacier he had crawled into after his Hollywood career sputtered. The villagers who discover him are predictably terrified, except for one: a 24-year-old woman—”long a spinster by then,” we’re informed—who immediately falls in love, and becomes his new bride. We then follow the couple through decades of adventures and foibles—among them an incident in which, yes, the monster gets plastered and manages to lose his wife’s entire flock of rare Italian sheep, leading her to roam the property calling out their names.
It’s one of several episodes that find Seaton’s comedically facile actors—Rhodri Lewis and Nicky Harley play the monster and his wife, respectively, while Vicky Allen and Chris Robinson narrate and assume various smaller parts—nurturing an intimate rapport with the audience, not by slamming down the fourth wall but by inviting us to join them on their whimsical ride. At other points, we’re called on to take part in a game of Bingo and become passengers on an airplane. (When Allen and Robinson, playing flight attendants, spotted me scribbling during a preview, they pointed to my notepad and started cooing, pretending it was a baby.)
Not all of the shenanigans are inspired; I could have, for instance, done without the fevered reading of Taylor Swift’s “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” that embellished an argument between the monster and his wife. But the pace is so brisk and the performances so sprightly that you barely notice the bits that don’t fly. Scenic and costume designer Ryan Dawson Laight provides spare but fanciful support for the many that do, from a dream sequence in which the monster imagines he’s back in Hollywood, “having a disastrous affair with Elsa Lanchester,” to the scene in which the couple try to “reconstruct their relationship” with a romantic dinner at the hotel they’re managing, as strains of “The Girl from Ipanema” play behind them.
Lewis and Harley also manage a tender chemistry, enhanced by the ungainliness that the latter performer—though clearly attractive—brings to the part of a village outcast, who announces early on that she has “either beaten up or drunk under the table every man in the middle at least once.” (The narrators make other insinuations about her interaction with male neighbors.) Lewis, walking stiffly, his eyes glowing under suitably grotesque makeup, lends the necessary pathos when needed—as the monster rescues a lost boy, or rues his past afflictions or indiscretions.
The play ends, in fact, with a moving passage in which the monster—now a widower who regularly smokes marijuana, and has “long, rambling, one-sided conversations” with the armoire that was once a point of contention between his wife and himself—pays homage to various souls who haven’t shared with him the blessing or curse of immortality. It’s a lovely ending point for this short, sweet and wild trip.
Frankenstein’s Monster Is Drunk and the Sheep have all Jumped the Fences opened January 17, 2023, at 59E59 and runs through January 28. Tickets and information: 59e59.org
