Mary Shelley

Shared Experience are a touring theatre company that gets better and better. They started in 1998 and are driven by their two artistic directors, Polly Teale and Nancy Meckler. I first came across them last year when Bronte came to the Oxford Playhouse, written by Polly and directed by Nancy. Their production of a new play, Mary Shelley, is by Helen Edmundson who had already written five adaptations for the company, and directed by Polly Teale.

I had some reservations about the length of the play, nearly three hours including an interval. But it needed every minute to show the complex relationships between Mary (daughter of the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft who died after Mary was born), her father (the radical political philosopher William Godwin), his wife and Mary's stepmother, her daughter Jane and Fanny, daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft from an earlier marriage. Add into the mix the young poet Percy Shelley, and I was very glad to have had the time before the performance started to study the family trees in the programme.

Mary is sixteen as the play begins, already highly educated and indoctrinated by the views of her father. But it is not long before the already married Percy Shelley, a follower of William Godwin, becomes infatuated by Mary and they elope to France with Jane. There is turmoil at the family home in Skinner Street, not least because Godwin has always had big problems with debt, and we are  constantly reminded of how this effected the family in 1814. But it is the hurt that Mary experiences when her father refuses to ever see her again that is the catylst for her writing Frankenstein at the age of eighteen.

The best thing about this play is the dialogue. Helen Edmundson is an exceptional writer, and that is why I preferred this play to Bronte. The acting is sublime throughout, and the four young members of the cast are terrific. Kristin Atherton is very good as Mary, but I thought that Shannon Tarbet was even better as Jane. William Chubb as Godwin and Sadie Shimmin as his wife are very experienced actors and it showed. The direction by Polly Teale is spot on. The play never wavers from being totally absorbing. And a packed Oxford Playhouse loved it.