By Teniola Ayoola
This article was originally published in Washington City Paper here.
It is a packed house on opening night of Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production Frankenstein. Onstage angular, dark wood beams frame a tall, imposing fireplace and a singular chair sits with a robe hanging on its back. Atmospheric lighting by Neil Austin and an eerie soundscape by André Pluess create the sense of haunting loss that anchors the production. But no green-skinned monster ever grunts into the frame. Instead, the monster in British director and writer Emily Burns’ adaptation is grief, privilege, and masculine neglect.
Burns, known for her incisive adaptations and storytelling precision at the National Theatre and with the Royal Shakespeare Company, is making her American directorial debut with Frankenstein. A project that began in 2020, when Burns, who has worked with STC’s artistic director Simon Godwin for nearly a decade and adapted last year’s star-studded Macbeth, submitted a seven-page treatment to STC, envisioning a version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein told through a feminist lens. The company commissioned her to develop it into a full production. Over the next several years, with input from STC’s dramaturg, Drew Lichtenberg, she worked on her adaptation.
Burns began by interrogating what she saw as a contradiction at the heart of Shelley’s story: Frankenstein is one of the most iconic horror and science fiction novels ever written, and it was authored by a woman—yet both the original text and many of its best-known adaptations revolve almost entirely around male characters.
“I was thinking about how male-focused Nick Dear’s 2011 stage adaptation is and how male-focused the novel is, and yet how it’s a female writer,” she says, before asking, “Why is it focused on men?”
With the goal of recentering the women in Shelley’s story, Burns turned to the original 1818 Frankenstein, where Victor Frankenstein’s abandonment—both of his wife, Elizabeth, and the Creature—is clearly condemned. Later revisions blurred that line, she says. According to Burns, the original, released anonymously, was far more emotionally raw and politically pointed. “It’s filled with ambitious men who are trying to create a name for themselves in their world,while she [Shelley] is at home trying to conceive, birth, and raise these children,” she says.
Before Victor brought his creature to life, Frankenstein was already a story shaped by maternal loss and abandonment. Shelley wrote the original story while in the throes of pregnancy, nursing, and grieving the death of her first child. The suicide of her sister also likely influenced her writing as did her husband’s—the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley—alleged affairs. It’s no surprise, then, that the 1818 version lays clear blame at Victor’s feet for abandoning the creature he created.
Deemed “too radical for Victorian sensibilities,” the second edition, released in 1823—with a manuscript edited by her husband—and a later version in 1831 softened that critique. Victor’s behavior became more fatalistic, his ambition framed as inevitable rather than negligent. Burns’ adaptation returns to the urgency of Shelley’s original. “Victor’s culpability and acceptance of culpability is kind of the central focus,” she says. “It’s not an immaculate conception. It’s this idea of a man creating life and then not taking responsibility for it.”
The result, now on stage through June 29, is a retelling that shifts the center of gravity—away from Victor’s ambition and toward the emotional, moral, and maternal fallout left in his wake. It’s about men, stitched together by ego and the privilege to walk away—from their partners, their children, their responsibilities—and still be worshipped for what they “created.”
Burns draws a direct line from Shelley’s lived experience—her personal tragedies echo throughout the play—to Elizabeth’s fictional fate. Multi-hyphenate artist Rebecca S’manga Frank, who plays Elizabeth, says she felt those parallels deeply: “I know this woman. This is the woman that’s us. And she wrote that.”
For Frank, Frankenstein isn’t just a Gothic story—it’s a map of female survival, of turning pain into expression. “Mary had miscarriage after miscarriage, she had children die … she had this incredible husband-lover situation, but then it turned into tragedy.”
That transformation—of tragedy into art—is something Frank sees as a uniquely powerful human instinct, and often a feminine one. “The potential to take something dark or tragic and to turn it into something beautiful—that is a choice,” she says. “Because you could choose to stay in the darkness … or you could choose to follow the light.”
She likens it to alchemy: composting what’s been discarded or devalued and repurposing it into something luminous. “You bring it back up to the light and transform it.”
With Frank at the helm, Burns has created a play that doesn’t just reinterpret Shelley—it reclaims her. Her adaptation captures what was always there but rarely centered. It honors the trauma of motherhood, the clarity of womanhood, and the slow, devastating truths about the men we mythologize as geniuses—without asking who was sacrificed along the way.
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