Episode 617. Remy Bumppo’s ‘Frankenstein’

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Nick Sandys is the artistic director of Chicago’s Remy Bumppo Theatre and is currently playing both Victor Frankenstein and the Creature in the Nick Dear adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic novel, which opens this week and runs through November 17, 2018, now also celebrating its 200th anniversary (he alternates roles with Greg Matthew Anderson). Nick talks about the power of this tale of monstrousness and how it fits into Remy Bumppo’s mission of great language driving great ideas. Featuring ways in which Shelley’s novel continues ideas expressed by Shakespeare in The Tempest, early modern analogues to rap battles, how one can highlight (and quite possibly confuse) certain issues, the precision with which one handles cultural negotiation, how the use of language — even in Shakespeare — tells you how a scene must be staged, how literature can also be a verb, how monsters are not born but made, and how one addresses the ultimate question: Who, really, is the monster? A star is shorn! (Length 22:42) (Photo of Nick Sandys as the Creature by Joe Mazza / Brave Lux.)

YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN: Austin Tichenor discusses his adaptation of Frankenstein with Rob Richards, who played the Creature in the original production and directed its first major revival, in Episode 360 of the RSC Podcast.