Mary Shelley, Jamie Parker (Read by), Full Cast (Read by)

Frankenstein

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Summary

Mary Shelley's heart-breaking modern myth of obsession, pride and the need for love, dramatised for BBC Radio, starring Jamie Parker.

Frankenstein was written by a teenager and the story has all the energy and emotional intensity of this time of life. It's a thrilling, horrifying adventure, packed with incident and breath-taking moments. But the incident and surface horror are metaphors for deeper, ever relevant themes: the hubris of science and those who practise it without moral responsibility; society's attitudes to difference; the quest for love. Most importantly, it raises profound questions about children; the love/hate relationship between parents and adolescents; the guilt and pain suffered by both when it all goes wrong.

Dramatised by Lucy Catherine.
Directed by Marc Beeby.
Starring Jamie Parker as Frankenstein, with Shaun Dooley, Susie Riddell, Alun Raglan, Robert Blythe, Sam Alexander, Christine Alexander, Patrick Brennan, Bruce Alexander, Emma Hook, Joe Sims and Don Gilet. Music by Colin Guthrie.

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in November 2012.

©2012 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd (P)2012 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

About the author

Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley (1797-1851), the daughter of pioneering thinkers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, eloped with the poet Percy Shelley at the age of sixteen. Three years later, during a wet summer on Lake Geneva, Shelley famously wrote her masterpiece, Frankenstein. The years of her marriage were blighted by the deaths of three of her four children, and further tragedy followed in 1822, when Percy Shelley drowned in Italy. Following his death, Mary Shelley returned to England and continued to travel and write until her own death at the age of fifty-three.

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