STAGE REVIEW: Mary Shelley @ People’s Theatre, Newcastle (10.02.26)

Image by Paul Hood

“You should not paint the chair, but only what someone has felt about it” (Edvard Munch)

It’s perhaps an easy thing to produce a biographical play, you have a ready-made protagonist, pre-set plot points, a list of background characters and an audience that should be familiar. It’s far less easy on the other hand, to produce a play that communicates the essence of what that character was. But this is what the People’s Theatre has achieved with their production of Mary Shelley.

The life of Mary was an unusually exceptional one, those familiar with her full biography will know that there could be a series of plays to cover the turbulent chapters of her life. This one focuses on her adolescence and her rapprochement with the famous poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Mary so happens to be the daughter of the radical philosopher William Godwin, although he’s a radical suited to milder climates, as a shocking revelation arrives too close to home. Such conflict between liberty and convention was an overriding theme throughout, and one very impactfully explored, not least in the very moving portrayal of Mary’s half-sister Fanny.

But whilst the plot of the play progressed well, to focus a review on this would be to undersell the magic of the show. For as Claude Debussy once wrote that “music is the space between the notes” so it’s arguably true here, from thoughtful changes of pace to some utterly mesmeric dream sequences, the boundlessness of Mary’s youth and the bohemianism of her nature was brought to life. The play’s avant-garde set design was another fine illustration, to have boxed Mary and co inside a rigid set would have conflicted with who they were and what they represented.

A thread of craft and care ran all the way through the production and along this were the actors themselves, whose nuanced and dignified characterisations felt lived in and second nature. The comfort on show actually brought to mind a resemblance with Vivien Leigh’s experience of performing Shakespeare; “like bathing in the sea – one swims where one wants”.

It would have been very easy to have made Mary Shelley a typical biopic, staged in an historically accurate way, and it would have been even easier for the performances to be straightforward mechanistic attempts at impersonation. But the joy of this production is that it dares beyond that, and therefore reaches something much higher. Perhaps the words of the Percy Shelley express that best: “When the lamp is shattered, The light in the dust lies dead, When the cloud is scattered, The rainbow’s glory is shed.”

Mary Shelley runs at The People’s Theatre, Newcastle until Saturday 14^th February.