It is always refreshing when someone takes a familiar true story and characters from history and reimagines the sequence of scenes that created their fame. Mary Humphrey Baldridge has taken the story of Byron's challenge to his friends on Lake Geneva in 1816 to write a ghost story which led to Mary Shelley writing one of the most famous horror stories of all Frankenstein. I was not familiar with his challenge or relationships but in this extremely well written seventy minute play, she hooks us into the hedonistic world this group inhabited and their obsession with Death and the after life.
In the intimate cramped surroundings of C venue 50 on Lawnmarket with a minimum of props and furniture, the Artists Collective Theatre recreate the houses that Byron and Shelley hired that summer in Switzerland and we see the influences that led Mary Shelley to respond to Byron's challenge in writing her story. The costumes are generally good although I failed to understand why they were all bare footed throughout and the two white knitwear jumpers they wear when going sailing looked like they had just been bought from a Scottish knitwear shop on the Royal Mile!
