Ulrich Zaum

The monster embodies a creature that everyone senses at their core, however diffuse, hidden under all of the layers of civilisation that make up our social personas. Essential life impulses: love as an all-consuming desire, rejection that amounts to destruction, and what remains is hate, the lonely passion… It has an uncommonly powerful melodramatic centre, while the other figures could have been taken from the repertoire of modernity. It is broken, insecure, unstable…
Mary Shelley noticed things that she in fact didn’t want to see. Her unbearably sharp vision cuts through every trivial model, she describes a completely contemporary phenomenon: the character type of non-identity. It is not the creature that is monstrous, but this weird, ominous silhouette of the approaching century… The figure of Elisabeth – clearly a parallel to Mary Shelley’s own existence. A highly talented woman who subordinated herself to her supposed betters. Percy B. Shelley, Lord Byron – both completely caught up in the task of asserting their own genius… quite devastating for the people they lived with. Mary Shelley lost all her children, following her poet husband on his search for Arcadia back and forth across humid, hot, cholera-ridden Italy. (From Ulrich Zaum’s notes on this play)

In intense, dense scenes, Ulrich Zaum weaves motifs from Shelley’s Frankenstein together with the biographies of Mary W. Shelley and Lord Byron. Expressive silhouettes, set contrapuntally to songs using fantastical material from Poe, Milton, Blake and Byron.