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One of Minna Gibbs-Nicholls’s sketches for the production |
Youth theatre’s all set for a monster hit
PREVIEW: FRANKENSTEIN
Cochrane Theatre
THERE'S a great new show coming to town: Frankenstein!
This new production by Youth Music Theatre: UK, adapted from Mary Shelley’s famous novel, comes to us with all the old glamour and darkness and now with a special twist.
If you enjoyed the old black and white tear-jerker of a movie as much as I did you’ll love this stage version. And it comes to the Cochrane Theatre, so I urge all students from the London Institute to step inside – to have a laugh, and find inspiration.
Devon writer Nick Stimson and composer Jimmy Jewell have created a great new show in which Victor Frankenstein tries to pursue his nemesis across the icy wastes to assuage his grief.
The performance drives to the central point of the familiar story, about a driven young scientist, Frankenstein, who obsesses about creating a human creature out of dead tissue, a perfect being for an imperfect world. However, what he does not anticipate is that the creature demands that his creator also show him love, proving that he is more than the sum of his body parts. As Frankenstein is unable and unwilling to fulfil this need, he rejects the creature, who turns on him to exact a terrible revenge, born of longing, frustration, and a deep sense of injustice. The creature decides the best way to satisfy his hurt and anger is to get back at Frankenstein by murdering all those close to him. Eventually, when confronted by his master, the creature implores him to make a
mate, a female clone, that will care for and understand him, and give him the love he desperately craves. He vows that, in return, he will leave him alone.
So Frankenstein creates – then destroys – the wife he makes.
The creature, in pain, decides to impose the grimmest consequences in retribution. He plans to murder Frankenstein’s bride on their wedding night.
Love and hate, creation and destruction – the major forces in the world are enacted here by the bright, young Youth Music Theatre of London.
The story has a real resonance today with our current obsessions with extending life, finding the perfect mate, and the medical ability to clone the perfect other.
Minna Gibbs-Nicholls’s designs are new. She is the sole designer of both costumes and sets and comes from the original show in Plymouth – a massive task to create anew for a London venue.
She trained at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and lives in Devon. Having left college, she approached Nick Stimson and declared her interest in working on the show.
Gibbs-Nicholls has learned in the process how to make a limited budget go far, and to use her time economically – the costumes and sets were not only designed, but made by her.
She says that the inspiration for those designs was drawn from her conception of Frankenstein’s “bigotted world of crazy science”.
Youth Music Theatre: UK was founded in 2003 and runs a vast series of residential music productions with young people. The casting for all productions are drawn from auditions in 18 different cities across the UK.
The basic remit for their work is that the young people are aged between 11 and 21 and the huge benefit of this is that they are not restricted to working within their year group, but can learn from working across a mixed age range. YMT:UK is among the leading residential theatre groups in the UK, bringing new artistic teams to the fore with each production.
They also have a training programme for graduates and take bespoke workshops into schools.
This show is supported by NAS/UWT.
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