Heartless, rational, sober, histrionic, empathetic, disconsolate, hopeful, positivist and nihilist, too explicit and at times subtle. As captivating as it is repulsive, in the exaggeration of the disjointed gestures that characterize the protagonist creature. Contradictory, likewise, sounds the supposedly illustrative discourse uttered by its creator, whose artificial reality he curses ipso facto, without giving it any margin for the celebration of life. This is the Frankenstein that is performed at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya, in a version by Guillem Morales and under the direction of Carme Portaceli.
A play starring Joel Joan and Àngel Llàcer, which leaves no one indifferent. It seems to seek a direct confrontation, overwhelming the spectator with a battery of epochal questions, which nevertheless reveal atavistic fears, concerns of timeless validity and inherent to the human being: the need to appease the indifferent action of nature. Especially those manifestations that threaten human integrity, being alien to the control and stability of rational consciousness, the organ that in sapiens sapiens promotes self-preservation and enables it for the artificial creation of a second nature.
THE MODERN PROMETHEUS
The reference to the "modern Prometheus" that Mary Shelley conceived as a result of the chilling evenings shared with other celebrated literati, fully belonging to the movement that transcended as Romanticism, is directed less at the monster and much more at the scientist who conceives it, and of whom he represents a perfect counterfigure, Dr. Frankenstein. The TNC's staging addresses in medias res the question: the eagerness to conquer death, to control and perpetuate life through technology, represents the updating of that foundational act for the development of civilization, as was the mythical theft of fire by Prometheus, and its subsequent delivery to men.
It is known that the Titan, friend of men, had to pay dearly for his audacity, which the Greeks called hybris. The emancipation of man and his departure from nature -as a mere animal determined by it- would provoke the wrath of Zeus, who decided to chain him to a rock and subject him to the torment of being devoured (specifically his liver, which grew back at the end of the day to redouble the torment the next) by an eagle. We might think that the punishment implied by rebellion against divine designs, or against the usual order of nature, are more subtle in the modern version of the myth. But that is not the case.
THE SCIENTIST AND HIS SHADOW
Neither Shelley nor some of the first variations of Frankenstein's monster -of course, not the present one either- overly sweeten the matter, implying that the origin of evil does not reside in the filthy reality of the artificial creature, which indeed frightens with its scars and unusual proportions. Evil is experienced as constitutive, it already vibrates within the one who needs to understand his own nature through the artificial act of giving birth, in the laboratory and thanks to electrical discharges from lightning, to that other being, only apparently different from himself.
One of the most powerful assets of the version of the Frankenstein myth starring Joel Joan and Àngel Llàcer -in the role of the monster and the doctor, respectively- lies precisely in the reciprocity and complementarity of their stories, which even develop simultaneously on stage. On other occasions, they also unfold successively, linking through eloquent parallelisms.
The concatenation is emphasized by a wonderful scenic element: a conveyor belt moves the actors against their will to the left of the stage, giving rise to another reality, the same one -in fact- that brings together creator and creature. The naivety of the newly returned to life contrasts with the enlightened cynicism of the scientist, who puts his knowledge at the service of the instinctive. As another fictional researcher in the same century would also do, Dr. Jekyll, to enable a life without ties, that of the filthy creature that he himself is, by means of a potion: Mr. Hyde.
CELEBRATIONS THAT ARE REVERSED
Long before that omega, of decadent fullness, still at the dawn of modernity, Giovanni Pico della Miradola celebrated -in a text that is considered the manifesto of humanism, Oration on the Dignity of Man- the distinction of the human being in relation to the rest of animals: a creature himself, yes, but created with an incomplete nature. A nature endowed with the capacity to freely complete and determine its own being, whether by lowering itself to the likeness of beasts or by rising above materiality.
The celebration of this hybrid, chameleon-like disposition seems to ignore the less luminous side of human behavior. And of course, how through the use of thought, in principle purifying, there is also a tendency to seek the promotion and satisfaction of the most instinctive. The instinctive and the rational, a priori antithetical principles, are not mutually exclusive in human beings. As an impenitent, deeply anti-systematic thinker would later reveal, they collaborate in strange and unpredictable ways. A point that this interesting representation of Frankenstein accentuates, by confusing and extrapolating the attributes of the creator and the creature.
The doctor's arts enable a second nature, which in principle is unconscious of itself and perfectly naive. The terrifying image projected through Joel Joan, of unsettling expressiveness, is in turn candid; while the manners and impeccable education of the scientist, embodied by Ángel Llàcer, exude falsity. His performance is unquestionably serious, and the attempt to subvert the comedic register, for which he is better known, is meritorious. The ambiguity of metafiction also connotes the superb performances of the Crack, and is put at the service of the plot.
TO EXPLICIT THE EMPTY DISCOURSE
The character of the scientist is urged by the need to stop the inexplicable death that affected his mother during the birth of his brother; a fact that leads him to the exacerbation of technological development, to the mortal leap of maximum deification that will sentence him. The tyrannical determination of fatum -a deeply romantic notion that can also be found in a more primitive way in the Greek notion of ananké, an invisible thread woven by the moiras- is masterfully staged through that simple scenic resource, which energizes events and incites perplexity in the viewer. The scientist's actions seem to follow that sinister aphorism by Franz Kafka, "a bird went in search of a cage." He alone will fall into the curse, caused by the invention that was precisely to solve his original anguish.
The monster learns to speak and think: from barbaric babbling, he moves on to elaborate Hamletian reflections, for which the scientist also has no answer. And, when he does, he doesn't know how to live up to it: that in nature there is neither cruelty nor beauty, that neither good nor evil exists, but rather indifference reigns -proclaims the doctor- is something he himself does not assume, hence his tendency to create artificial life that complements and repairs the traumas inflicted by the most natural experience. That indifference that Lars von Trier shamelessly exhibits in the revulsive and blinding Antichrist is outlined in the Teatre Nacional production.
But unlike what is depicted in the film, in the theatrical version (of the problematic repair of the evil suffered by the protagonist) what we eventually find is an excess of discourse. Many and very elaborate words, which when uttered resonate sonorously, while saving the spectator from their own elaboration. They minimize the anguish that a discourse empty of meaning, completely a-rational, should awaken. The discourse that cannot be understood, and that should thus be shown.
LAUGHTER AS A TANGENT
The shift is progressive but very evident, that which reveals the transformation of the scientist into a beast and of the beast into a scientist. In this sense, the poster announcing the play -hyper-symptomatic in the specular vision of both characters, with scars- is a spoiler in every sense. The performance of the secondary characters is very convincing, more contained than that of the protagonist duo, creator and creature, united by a common loss of innocence that marks them, by the incomprehension of which they are victims and which they provoke with undisguised pathos. It is a solemn and tragic play, which also provides a space for laughter. Thaumaturgical laughter, for example, in the course of the learning of the unformed and endearing monster, and of his demand to also have a partner reconstructed from pieces (as in the play The Bride of Frankenstein, from 1935, a sequel to the mythical film also starring Boris Karloff and directed by James Whale).
But also -even more interestingly- it gives rise to hysterical laughter, given the margin of corruption that characterizes it, like any natural being. It is the laughter that feels out of place, precisely prompted by that which generates dread, in the familiar presence of the sinister. Atavistic fears are represented with few, but effective means; and, above all, illustrated with an endless number of expressions by the monster in spite of himself, embodied by Joel Joan. It's hard not to empathize with someone who reflects incomprehension and injustice. More complex is understanding the need that, like the good Dr. Frankenstein, leads the rational mentality of our species to create it, to embrace technological artifice as a solution to the instinctive dimension, which is simultaneously repudiated.