This article titled “Frankenstein – review” was written by Michael Billington, for The Guardian on Thursday 24th February 2011 00.46 UTC

Forget Boris Karloff with a bolt through his neck. Forget even Peter Boyle as the new, improved monster singing Puttin’ On The Ritz in the Mel Brooks pastiche. What you get in Danny Boyle’s production and Nick Dear’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s mythic fable, with Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller alternating as Victor Frankenstein and the Creature, is neither shlock nor satire. Instead it’s a humane, intelligent retelling of the original story in which much of the focus is on the plight of the obsessive scientist’s sad creation, who becomes his alter ego and his nemesis: it’s rather like seeing The Tempest rewritten from Caliban’s point of view.

As a piece of staging, it is brilliant. But, before listing its virtues, one has to concede that Boyle and Dear, in focusing more on the victim than on Victor, downplay some of Shelley’s themes. Because Victor himself hardly figures until halfway through the action, his initial hubris in animating lifeless matter is minimised. Mary Shelley’s story also throbs with a fierce sense of injustice: a cultivated French family is ruined by its defiance of government, the innocent suffer through Victor’s divine presumption. The echoes are still there in Dear’s two-hour version but Shelley’s rage against existing social structures is muted.

If there are losses, there are also huge gains. We follow the painful progress of the Creature from his first sensational, stuttering steps as he bursts stark naked out of a vertical frame to his education in language and feeling by Karl Johnson’s blind, political exile. We also see the Creature’s yearning for companionship, his longing for love, his aching need for a female counterpart. Even when he is driven to murder, the guilt ultimately belongs to Victor. And when the Creature rapes Victor’s bride before killing her, it is as if he is expressing his creator’s own dark, suppressed desires.

In performance, it is also fascinating to compare the two actors. Cumberbatch’s Creature is unforgettable. “Tall as a pine tree,” as the text insists, he has humour as well as pathos: his naked entry into the world is marked by a totter on splayed feet and, when he moves, it is with a forward-thrusting, angular, almost Hulotesque curiosity. But there is also an epic grandeur about Cumberbatch. As he quotes Paradise Lost, his voice savours every syllable of Milton’s words and when, in outrage at his rejection by the exile’s family, he burns their cottage, he utters a Hamletesque cry of “I sweep to my revenge.” It is an astonishing performance.

Miller’s strength, in contrast, lies in his menace. Stockier than Cumberbatch, his Creature makes you believe in the character’s Satanic impulse and in his capacity for murder: when he hoists Victor’s brother on to his shoulders you instantly fear for the boy’s life. You feel Miller exults in the ultimate role-reversal in which the servant becomes the master. But when it comes to Frankenstein, I felt Cumberbatch had the edge in that he offered clearer hints of the scientist’s cold-hearted single-mindedness.

The actors complement each other perfectly rather than provide a contest and Boyle’s production is a bravura triumph in which Mark Tildesley’s design provides a whole series of visual coups. A candle-filled canopy overhangs the auditorium and blazes into light to evoke Victor’s galvanizing experiments. A steam-belching train surges ominously forward to summon up early 19th-century industrialisation. And the Creature’s rhapsodic discovery of nature is beautifully suggested through birds shooting forth from treetops and rain saturating a narrow strip of turf.

Once or twice the language lapses into bathos: you feel Victor’s bride might come up with something less prim than “We’ll have none of that” when the Creature paws her breast. But, on the whole, this a stunning evening. Dear and Boyle highlight the feminist critique of male usurpation of divinity that lurks in Shelley’s text. Above all, they constantly make us ask which of the two main characters is the real monster. Is it the disfigured, repulsive Creature or Frankenstein himself with his subordination of love and friendship to the idea of creative perfection? The issue is not so much resolved as left hanging as the two figures memorably depart into an eternal icy wilderness.

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