9 novembER 2024, 19.30

Frankenstein 

performance by Office for a Human Theatre

direction, scene and script Filippo Andreatta
inspired by Mary W. Shelley, Clarice Lispector
sound and music Davide Tomat
performer Silvia Costa, Maria Isidora Vincentelli
direction assistant Veronica Franchi
props and fittings Cosimo Ferrigolo
lights Andrea Sanson
light engineer Marco Filippone

costumes Lucia Gallone
scene scultpure and automation Plastikart Studio
wax torso and masks Nadia Simeonkova
painted backdrop Paolino Libralato
engineer Orlando Cainelli
stage engineer Rebecca Quintavalle
photos Giacomo Bianco
teaser Anouk Chambaz
development and communication Anna Benazzoli
creative producer Chiara Boitani
administrator  Lucrezia Stenico
international development Job Rietvelt

a production by OHT - Office for a Human Theatre
co-production TPE Teatro Piemonte Europa, Snaporazverein (CH)
artists-in-residence Centrale Fies
contribution by MiC, Provincia Autonoma di Trento, Fondazione Caritro di Trento e Rovereto

2024_Frankestein

For the first time OHT tackles a classic of Western literature; Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus. Written by an author still in her teens, and with the intention of instilling fear, Mary Shelley’s masterpiece anticipates contemporary climate anxiety, giving rise to a new literary genre; science fiction horror. Published immediately after the most powerful volcanic eruption ever recorded by man, Frankenstein is not only a literary icon but, first and foremost, a reaction to the climatic anomaly caused by the Mount Tambora volcano in Indonesia. According to climatologists the eruption caused the Year Without a Summer; a dystopian period due to the sulphur fog that clouded the stratosphere and turned the sky yellow, lowered temperatures, caused violent and continuous storms with considerable damage to agriculture and consequent famines in Europe, North America and Asia. It was in 1816 and in this atmosphere, that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein.

Surprisingly close to the political nuances of OHT’s own exploration, Frankenstein is a myth in which the exterior landscapes merge with the interior ones. The precipices of Mont Blanc become intimate and personal vertigo in the encounter between the monster and his creator; inaccessible places such as the Alps and the Arctic are a crucial refuge for an elusive creature, who learns to know himself through the natural phenomena that manifest themselves there. The demon and those landscapes become one while Victor Frankenstein no longer seems in control of his surroundings. The radicality of Shelley’s work materialises in the emancipation of the creature. Unexpectedly, Frankenstein reveals itself as a vehement and contemporary coming of age novel.

Caught in the limits of cultural taxonomy, the most human being par excellence of Western literature has not had a reading detached from its interpreted context. A limit that, paradoxically, has imprisoned the book in its own imaginary, within the lasso of an interpretation harnessed by the vision of so-called “normal / natural” readers. The interpretation of Frankenstein [who is actually the creator and not the creature, as one tends to believe] has always prevailed over that of the monster even if the emotional, neurological, and literary heart of the book lies in the creature’s learning of itself, of language and the world. It is from this deviation, from this exclusion, that OHT’s work is born; for the first time it is the monster that speaks, and takes the floor not as an excluded person but as the architect of our imagination, as one of our fellow citizens, as one of our monstrous peers. Finally, the monster is reborn, revealing itself as a newborn of Western literature; an infant to whom appear the first colours, the forms that acquire volume, whose hands begin to grasp, whose throat and lips, until then capable only of guttural cries, articulate their first words. A monstrous birth that evades literary confines, creating a new imaginary:

"And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper" Mary Shelley

OHT’s new production by starts from the experiment of Dr Frankenstein and, dispensing with the narrative, makes partial and vertical plunges into the text, without limits of form, language and duration. Shelley’s work becomes material to be examined, dissected, stitched together, a body available for different scenic experiments: a theatrical performance, a reading session, an installation, a radio play that will be generated as parts of the same experiment that progresses horizontally in the novel to investigate its multiple ramifications.

The fragments thus produced borrow the obscenity of the demon and become a deformed amalgamation of raw material abandoned prematurely; scenic experiments that, showing themselves in their inadequacy, trigger the same short circuit to the origin of Frankenstein’s creature inviting us to come to terms with what we usually omit from sight and consider monstrous.