Fantasmagoriana

ADC Theatre, 2nd-5th March, 11pm, £4-6

Directed by Georgia Hume

[rating: 1/5]

About twenty minutes into Fantasmagoriana a sobering clanger dropped. ‘This is really not very good,’ I thought. ‘I mean, it’s really not very good.’ And I started to fret. Why had I been sent to review the flop instead of, say, this week’s high-profile ADC mainshow, The Seagull feat. Simon Haines? Maybe I had been demoted by The Tab like a disgraced member of the cabinet. Perhaps I was a metaphorical transport minister, or environment, food and rural affairs minister, or one of those other ones that no one cares about?

Of course, this thinking was rather absurd, but it had the pleasing concomitant of distracting me from the action. Or rather, from ‘the people on the stage’, action being rather too generous a word for whatever was going on, namely nothing. Fantasmagoriana, a piece of new theatre written and produced by Tamara Micner, represented the prehistory of Mary Shelley’s (Katie Alcock) Frankenstein: a story competition proposed by an idle Lord Byron (the louche Adam Drew) whilst holed up in a grand house on Lake Geneva.

Also populating the scene were Percy Shelley, (Laurens Macklon), John Polidori  (Jack Oxley) and Claire Clairmont (Catherine Trinder). Byron is escaping his own scandals in London (incest, sodomy, the usual), Mary and Percy are travelling, Polidori is Byron’s sometime plaything and Claire Clairmont is utterly pointless.

In fact, everything is rather pointless, for besides enacting the historical context of a canonical literary work, Fantasmagoriana didn’t do anything that Wikipedia couldn’t have done without having to take a trip to the ADC. It was difficult to summarise the dramatic centre – Mary seemed to be having some trouble writing a story, but she was flatly pragmatic and seemingly unconcerned about it, so it seemed a strange premise for the creation of a script.

Photographs by Milla Basma

Drama pivots on actions and conflicts; Fantasmagoriana’s models felt bewilderingly insubstantial. Byron seems nothing but a little agitated by his essential banishment from London. Granted, Drew’s was the best performance, delivering the only amusing lines with comedic timing; but he was adrift in a cast of other non-performances. Byron’s affair with Polidori was alluded to and the arrival of a former conquest, Clairmont, provided a climate in which a required conflict might have been evinced. It was not. Clairmont’s ‘revelation’ that she was pregnant was handled with the sort of blasé treatment that might have been the fitting response to someone announcing they were popping to the loo; it then seemed to be dropped from the play altogether.

Mary and Percy, embroiled in what might have been a rather scandalous affair – they had fled Britain, Percy’s wife and Mary’s father – evidenced no sense of their love conquering  such obstacles, a cliché that might have stuck in the craws of this sparse lateshow crowd, but at least would have demonstrated an emotion of some sort, trite or not. Polidori’s entry for the story competition was hysterical and unamusing.

Style over substance, it seemed: the set was well-constructed, and actually showed a greater conception of character depth than the script in the placing of each of the characters.  There was a chaise longue for luxurious, expansive Byron; an armchair for Shelley where Mary, as yet cowed by his reputation as a writer, could perch on the edge; a wooden chair for Polidori, kept at arm’s length; and no chair for Claire. This choreography of staging gestured towards the essential conflicts and characterisations that ought to have fleshed out the script.

The ADC was half-empty in a week that suggested long evenings in the bar post-Seagull trying to make eye contact with Simon Haines before ending up, confusedly, at the lateshow all of a sudden; new writing is not an endearing term. Unfortunately, I fear that anyone who does stumble in there would have had more fun trying to work out if he winked at you or whether that was just a twitch than watching Fantasmagoriana.