Frankenstein, Unstitched: An Evening with Director Aidan O'Reilly

In 1816, eighteen-year-old Mary Godwin spent a stormy summer at a villa on Lake Geneva, where a group of friends challenged one another to write a ghost story. She already knew a great deal about loss. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died just eleven days after Mary was born, and Mary's own first child had died the year before. Her ghost story became Frankenstein, a tale about making life and then abandoning what you have made.

Two centuries on, the story keeps being retold. It reached the London stage in 1823, five years after publication, and became Boris Karloff's iconic flat-topped Creature in the 1931 Universal film. The reinventions continue, from Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein (2025) to Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride! (2026). Each version reflects something about the era that creates it.

David Catlin's adaptation, now playing at the Blackfriars Playhouse, puts Mary back in the room. She tells her tale to the…