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BLOOD AND ICE
Introduction
Blood and Ice, my first play, was performed in its first full incarnation at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 1982 at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh with Gerda Stevenson perfectly cast as Mary. She was lovely. Young, heartbreakingly young was how she played it, in love with a poet and with a poetic ideal, earnest, passionately enquiring, passionately committed to living a life that secretly terrified her.
Nevertheless, the play, even by its kindest critics â and, yes, there were some of those â could not possibly be called an unqualified success. It was far too long for one thing, and was, literally, all over the place. I, for one, must admit that I canât, now, make head or tail of the original script, although within its excesses I can see it also contains what proved to be the still-beating heart of the whole creature, which is an exploration of the sources, and the consequences for its creator, of an enduring and immortal myth.
Mary Godwin Shelley lived at the cusp of reason and romanticism. She was the daughter of two great Age of Reason radical philosophers of freedom: William Godwin, author of Political Justice, and Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a founding feminist who died of puerperal fever just one week after giving birth to Mary. This legacy weighed heavily upon the child. As did, later, her own female biological destiny.
So much for free love. From the age of sixteen, when she ran away with him, married already as he was, until the death of Shelley eight years later when she was only twenty-four, she herself was almost constantly either pregnant, recovering from miscarriage or mourning the death of a child. (Only one, the delicate Percy Florence, was to survive into adulthood.) So many deaths. The suicides of her own Shelley-obsessed sister and Shelleyâs deserted wife were sore enough but, far worse, the deaths of so many little innocents â their own, and the child of her stepsister and Byron too, all dragged around Europe in that ultimate romantic pursuit of their progenitors. No surprise perhaps that, prescient as she must have been â many, though not all, of these griefs lay ahead of her â this particular seventeen-year-old girl should have come up with a deep-felt fantasy of a new way of creating life. She was already, Iâm sure, subconsciously aware of pushing herself beyond her own natural boundaries. Therefore the myth emerged as far from Utopian, but one of horror and terror of Science, a myth that remains potent for our nuclear age, our age of astonishment and unease at the fruits of perhaps-beyond-the-boundaries genetic experimentation.
That garbled first script of mine nevertheless contains, more or less verbatim, many of the scenes which are still extant in this version, the umpteenth and, I have promised myself, final version, which was completed for a 2003 production in the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh instigated by, and directed by, Graham McLaren, with whom in the last decade I have collaborated on several versions of classic plays for Theatre Babel.
Many young directors, many young actors, university students and struggling new fringe companies have, since 1982, taken on the challenge of this play. I have met quite a few since who were keen to tell me: âThis was the first play I found for myself and just knew I had to direct itâ; or âI played Byronâ; or âI was Shelleyâ; or âI loved playing Mary.â Many of these productions, the ones I saw at any rate, had wonderful moments. Theyâd fire me up and get it going again for me. I got on with trying to write other plays, but, all through the 1980s, like a dog returning to its own vomit, Iâd go back to it, trying, abortively, to solve the problem of the structure, find what would finally seem the satisfactory form, keeping up the pursuit myself â for its own sake, whether there was an upcoming production or not â happily scribbling away through long lonely nights, just as obsessively, I had to own, as half-mad Frankenstein himself labouring with his unlovely creation, looking for the spark of life.
That spark came towards the end of the decade when, in 1988, David McVicar, now world-famous as a director of opera, but then a second-year student at Glasgowâs Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, phoned me up and said he wanted to direct the play and had a cast together for a production at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
I remember saying, âDonât do it. Yes, it has great ideas in it, and a couple of great scenes, but it doesnât actually work.â
David said, âI know, but I think I can see whatâs wrong with it. Can we have a coffee and talk?â
I met David. Then went to a rehearsal and fell in love with the cast. It had to be a real ensemble piece and they were a real ensemble. So young, so talented and full of fire. I felt: hey, this lot might actually be about to crack itâŚ
They got me doing, for nothing of course, but happily, obsessively again, loads and loads of work, more midnight oil, on a new script, one very, very like this one published here.
David McVicarâs production in its Edinburgh Fringe Scout Hall venue was thrilling. It was alive! Candlelit, and in 1960âs cheesecloth shirts and loon pants and simple long hippy-chick dresses for the girls, it had an amazing coup de thÊâtre when, from under the alpine peaks of an unmoving heap of muslin, the Creature, at the end of the first act, naked and beautiful as a baby, suddenly stood up and made the audience gasp â and terrified Mary into sitting down to write.
The cast were fantastic. Wendy Seagerâs Mary, Daniela Nardiniâs Claire (for the first time not merely an annoying idiot of a millstone for Mary but also passionate, and pitiable, a convincingly whole, if not well-rounded, person asserting, painfully, her own right to love), John Kazekâs brooding Byron and John Straitonâs incandescent Shelley were all so young and so beautiful they had charm enough to make us actually care about this set of self-indulgent, if brilliant, adventurers.
They were invited to perform their production at the Traverse that autumn, and RSAMD gave them leave of absence from the final year of their course to do so. It was sold out and there were queues for returns. When they had graduated, Blood and Ice was the first production of David McVicarâs far too short-lived touring company Pen Name.
A ghost, for me, was laid to rest.
When, half a dozen years ago, Graham McLaren came to me wanting to do Blood and Ice on the big stage of Edinburghâs Royal Lyceum, I said, â⌠yes â but, oh, itâs practically impossible to bring off, the actors must be really, really young, and also credibly these brilliant poets, and be gorgeous, and charming, especially Shelley, whom I havenât ever managed to make so enough in the script, and they must all be human and vulnerable, even Byron â and youâll have to make sure they find a lot of laughter and lightness in the opening scene, and some playful, joyful and easy sensuality too, because there is so little of that shown as the play begins at the point the cracks are appearing, and because there is so much darkness ahead in the journey. And, Graham, for the big stage, Iâll really have to have a wee go at the structureâŚâ
Grahamâs production, with another lovely young cast, was very beautiful, very spooky, very romantic and made me very happy.
Itâs exactly thirty years since I first took down from a library shelf Muriel Sparkâs Child of Light, her wonderful biography of Mary Shelley, and, shortly after, began my own pursuit. Could I make a playâŚ? Naively, I was, at the time, quite blithely unaware that I wasnât the first, and certainly wouldnât be the last, to be fired by the dramatic possibilities of this moment in history, that iconic stormy summer of 1816 by the shores of the lake and beneath the...
