‘Mary: The Birth of Frankenstein’ – A shock-goth-rock theatre experience of mania and monsters – Review
“Can you not feel it? The power of possibility coursing through your veins? Tonight, we are not men or women, we are gods!”
A Dark Storm Gathers
And so the stage is set for a haunting and horrifying tale of the birth of modern horror from the fractured mind and tormented heart of an 18-year-old girl named Mary Godwin. The year is 1816, the infamous ‘year without a summer,’ and lightning crashes outside Villa Diodati. It is into this storm-lashed, brooding environment that playwright Jess Sayer and director Oliver Driver thrust audiences in Auckland Theatre Company’s bold, striking and ravenous new theatre experience: Mary: The Birth of Frankenstein. What unfolds is a fever dream of gothic mania and creative ecstasy that will leave your heart racing and your skin crawling.
Jess Sayer Unleashes Her Creation
Jess Sayer has long proven herself a multi-talented force in New Zealand storytelling. Whether as the fan-favourite Shortland Street character Maeve Mullins or as a daring playwright with works at Basement Theatre, Sayer is an artist unafraid to push limits. Now, in her Auckland Theatre Company debut, she delivers a work of ferocious ambition. Drawing from the fateful night when a grief-stricken Mary Godwin, soon to be Mary Shelley, conjured modern horror with Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, Sayer channels gothic dread, burning passions, and unspeakable terrors into a theatrical experience that is equal parts shocking and exhilarating.
Her narrative zig-zags with deliberate chaos, never content with linear storytelling. Instead, Mary: The Birth of Frankenstein thrashes and claws like a wounded beast, snapping at its audience with shocks and surprises. This is no history lesson, it’s a punk-rock nightmare stitched from the remnants of Byron’s debauchery, Shelley’s idealism, Polidori’s vanity, and Mary’s raw grief and brilliance.
Villa Diodati – The House of Madness
From the moment audiences step inside, the stage swallows them into darkness. Thunder cracks. A horrifying scream pierces the air. We are inside Villa Diodati, where Lord Byron reigns supreme and where wine, lust, and narcotics fuel the night. The infamous gathering of Byron, Percy Shelley, Dr. John Polidori, Claire Clairmont, and Mary Godwin sets the stage for a contest of wills. When Byron provokes Mary into a ghost story competition, the seed is planted for the creation of Frankenstein—and for the birth of modern horror itself.
But Sayer refuses to let this be a mere drawing-room drama. Villa Diodati becomes a haunted house of horrors, where debauchery transforms into mania, vanity mutates into monstrosity, and Mary’s own fractured psyche splits open before our eyes.
The Voice of a Tormented Angel
At the centre of this storm is Olivia Tennet as Mary Godwin. Tennet delivers a rousing, impassioned, and feral performance that cements her as the mother of modern horror. She begins as the wallflower, unwanted at Byron’s debauched carnival, her grief weighing her down in gothic poise. But as the night escalates, she unleashes her voice and intellect, clashing with Byron in a battle of wills: man against woman, arrogance against resilience, narcissism against genius.
Minute by minute, Tennet shifts and grows in the role, showing us Mary’s transformation from grief-stricken girl to literary visionary. Her performance is fierce, fiery, and deeply human. By the final act, she is incandescent with creative power—rock ’n’ roll Mary Shelley, conjuring monsters from her mind and reshaping the world of literature forever.
What Evil Lurks in the Hearts of Men
The three principal male performers with Tom Clarke, Dominic Ona-Ariki and Arlo Green, all make their mark on the show with their unique turns as Lord George Byron, Percy Shelley and Dr. John Polidori. And each provides a perfect foil to Tennet’s Mary, each distinct in their own grotesquerie, jealousy and ravenous villainy.
As Lord Byron, Tom Clarke is the supreme tastemaker, bon vivant and arrogance incarnate, and his performance shifts from a purveyor of good times to a vicious, life-sucking vampiric figure, happy to unleash misery and destruction all around him for his own amusement, becoming a black hole of destructive charisma. Dominic Ona-Ariki is a combustible force of creative potential, but his awe for his friend and idol, Lord Byron, blinds him to his lover’s ill-treatment, and he takes ever more galled steps to the dark side throughout the production. Finally, Arlo Green as Dr. John Polidori announces himself as Lord Byron’s ill-tempered and vain ‘house pet’ who can’t help but take an instant dislike to Mary, who deeply threatens him, but whose performative vanity is sure to get a rise out of the audience.
The Spark of Chaos
Timme Cameron, in her ATC debut, delivers a scene-stealing performance as Claire Clairmont, Mary’s flamboyant step-sister. Brash, loud, and endlessly chaotic, Cameron’s Claire is the wild opposite of Mary’s brooding grief. She struts across the stage like a live-streaming influencer at Coachella, desperate for attention, throwing herself into bad choices with reckless abandon. Her “look at me” energy jolts the production into frenzied unpredictability. Cameron balances this chaos with moments of touching sisterhood, revealing the complex rivalry and bond between the two women. It is an explosive debut that announces a major new talent.
Shock Goth Rock Madness
Oliver Driver last shocked ATC audiences with his 2017 production of Amadeus, and with Mary: The Birth of Frankenstein he raises the bar once again. His direction brims with punk-rock energy, weaving together intellectual debate, gothic horror, and grotesque comedy into a frenetic theatrical experience. One moment you’re laughing hysterically, the next you’re leaping from your seat in fright.
Driver embraces chaos without ever losing control, balancing the gothic gravitas of Mary’s grief with sudden eruptions of violence, debauchery, and terror. This is theatre at its most alive—feral, unpredictable, and dripping with shock value. His partnership with Sayer feels electric, each feeding the other’s audacity.
The staging is a triumph of gothic immersion. Villa Diodati is realised as a decaying palace of debauchery, a haunted house lit in clashing shades of crimson, fuchsia, murky green, and abyssal black. Lightning flashes, storms rage, and shadows consume the set, pulling the audience deeper into Byron’s den.
The decrepit decadence of Villa Diodati is matched by Sarah Voon’s costume design which blends Romantic elegance with goth rock flair, its lace and corsetry meeting suspenders and fishnets, and completed with Doc Martens and Chuck Taylors. It’s Byron and Shelley reimagined as glam-punk icons, and it works spectacularly. The design makes the show feel both timeless and startlingly modern, enhancing its shock-rock energy.
‘It’s Alive, It’s Alive.’
While not wanting to hint towards any kind og spoilers, I must relate to two standout moments from the show that had me cranked. The first involved our characters falling into a ravenous spiral of drug-induced debauchery when the party partakes of one Polidori’s mysterious concoctions that sends the characters, and especially Mary, into a rhythmically induced free fall of eroticised dance set to Massive Attack’s “Dissolved Girl”. Impeccably choreographed by Ross McCormack, Mary finds herself trapped inside the warped shadows of her fractured mind, and the blaring pulse of the music and striking red light is slashed across the stage in a violent fit of energy.
Matched to this, and announcing the arrival of the second act is the crackle of thunder as the switch is thrown on ‘The Resurrection”, and this moment of maddening creation that echos ‘It’s Alice, It’s Alive’ makes the whole theatre shudder and crash with a blaring boom, and the crackle of lights and lasers that exemplify the thunderous power of the storm as Mary’s creature rises to life. And horrors descend upon the audience. It’s a moment that will make you jump in your seat with excitement, before the tingle of fear begins to pull at your mind and your spine, as the theatre darkens to the shadows and the monster runs free.
A Gothic Masterpiece
Mary: The Birth of Frankenstein is a feral gothic horror experience that fuses intellect, passion, and chaos into one unforgettable night of theatre. It rages with burning emotions, fractured relationships, and shocking twists, holding its audience in a vice-like grip of fear and exhilaration. Jess Sayer, like Mary Shelley before her, has captured lightning in a bottle, crafting a work that will echo in the minds of its audience long after the curtain falls.
It is daring. It is deranged. It is deliciously gothic. And it may well be one of Auckland Theatre Company’s greatest productions to date. On a dark and stormy night, this is exactly where you want to be.
Auckland Theatre Company’s Mary: The Birth of Frankenstein is now showing at ASB Waterfront Theatre until September 7. Get your tickets here.
Image: Andi Crown
