A terrifying re-imagining of the night Mary Shelley became the mother of horror.
How does a young woman in the early 19th century, burdened with grief and surrounded by towering egos, give life to one of literature’s greatest monsters? Auckland Theatre Company’s Mary: The Birth of Frankenstein wrestles with this question in an original and unsettling production that combines historical fact with theatrical imagination. It is a slow-burning drama of rivalry, seduction, philosophy, and anguish, culminating in a storm of sound and light that shakes both stage and audience.
The story begins in 1816 at the Villa Diodati, perched on the shores of Lake Geneva. The house is drenched in darkness and perpetual rain. This was the “year without a summer,” when the eruption of Mt Tambora had cast Europe into a strange global cooling. For Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin, Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori, the foul weather left them confined indoors. What might have been idle nights of diversion instead became an explosive crucible of artistic daring, sexual politics, and existential fear.
Photo credit: Andi Crown
The production fixes itself in a single set, the grand parlour and library of the villa. There is a staircase leading to an internal gallery, so characters can move above and around each other, yet never truly escape. The effect is both claustrophobic and theatrical, a sense of elegant confinement where personalities clash and emotions ferment.
At the centre is Mary Godwin, played with sharp emotional clarity by Olivia Tennet. She is only 18 years old, but already carries more sorrow than many twice her age. Her grief over the loss of her child shadows her every action. Around her orbit dangerous Lord Byron (Tom Clarke), hedonistic and magnetic; Percy Shelley (Dominic Ona-Ariki), passionate yet cruelly unfaithful; Claire Clairmont (Timmie Cameron), volatile and consumed by jealousy; and John Polidori (Arlo Green), neurotic and unsteady.
Photo credit: Andi Crown
It is Byron who sparks the famous challenge: each guest must write a ghost story. What begins as a game quickly descends into something darker. The parlour becomes a cauldron of lust, bitterness, intellectual one-upmanship, and private betrayals. Characters circle one another like predators and prey, each seeking dominance, affection, or validation.
Tennet’s Mary is compelling because she does not begin in strength. She is hesitant, fragile, and overlooked by the men around her. Yet as rivalries and philosophies clash, she hardens. Slowly, she seizes the creative force denied to her, even as the men dismiss her voice. Her arc mirrors the act of creation itself: violent, painful, and defiant. By the end, she emerges triumphant yet scarred, carrying with her the seed of Frankenstein.
Photo credit: Andi Crown
The production is not so much a ghost story as it is an exploration of how one is written. Sayer’s script and Driver’s direction frame creation as both act and ordeal. To create is to confront loss, anger, ambition, and fear. It is also to test boundaries of power, gender, and mortality. The play suggests that monsters are not found but made, and that in order for Mary to create her monster she must step into monstrosity herself.
This is heightened by the historical backdrop. Mary Shelley’s life had been shaped by loss from the start. Her mother, feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, died soon after childbirth. Her father William Godwin raised her in an environment of radical thought, yet she remained constrained by society’s dismissal of women’s voices. By the time she entered Byron’s villa, she had already been disowned, impoverished, bereaved, and betrayed. Her creation of Frankenstein was not a flight of fancy but the expression of a young woman who had endured more than her share of grief and fury.
Photo credit: Andi Crown
For ninety minutes, the production simmers. Dialogue is rapid, laced with rhetoric, poetry, and barbed philosophy. It takes time to adjust to the tempo, yet once the rhythm is caught the interplay between characters becomes electric. The audience is invited to watch these figures trap each other with words and seductions. Each debate and quarrel raises the stakes, building a mood of unease.
Then comes the brief interlude, and with it, the explosion. Lights strobe, sound roars, lasers cut through the air, and the set itself shifts and transforms. What has been a chamber piece erupts into a phantasmagoria. The final section lasts only a quarter-hour, yet it is the exclamation mark on the long buildup. Creation, destruction, fear, and madness collide in an assault on the senses.
Photo credit: Andi Crown
It is striking to see horror performed so effectively in theatre. Without film’s editing and close-ups, the tools must be different. This production leans into shadow, into partial glimpses, into noises that erupt without warning. Figures are obscured, lights flash unpredictably, and the room itself seems haunted by the emotions it has absorbed. It is not horror in the sense of jump scares but horror as dread, unease, and the realisation that human beings can be the monsters they fear.
Mary: The Birth of Frankenstein is not just a retelling of a famous period in literary history. It is an exploration of how anger, loss, and desperation can give birth to creation. It is about a young woman surrounded by those who doubt her, carving her own space in defiance of them. It is about how one must sometimes become monstrous to bring forth something that will outlast mortality.
Photo credit: Andi Crown
The Auckland Theatre Company has delivered a work that feels both intimate and epic, one that begins as a drawing-room drama and ends as a gothic storm. At its heart is the reminder that Frankenstein was never just about a stitched-together creature, but about the very human impulse to make, to challenge, to overreach, and then to recoil at what we have wrought.
In this production, Mary Shelley’s monster is not yet alive, but we watch the moment of its conception. It is a moment born of grief, rivalry, and rebellion, and it makes for theatre that is as unsettling as it is exhilarating.
MARY: The Birth of Frankenstein is being performed at the Auckland's ASB Waterfront Theatre from 21 Aug - 7 Sep 2025.
You can purchase tickets here
You can purchase tickets here