Blood and Ice

Renowned poet and dramatist Liz Lochhead tells the story of Frankensteins creation.

Summer 1816. A house party on the shores of Lake Geneva. Eighteen-year-old Mary and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, along with Marys half-sister Claire and the infamous Lord Byron, take part in a challenge to see who can write the most horrifying story. Marys contribution is to become one of the most celebrated Gothic novels of all time.

Using flashbacks and the rich poetic language for which she has become admired, Lochhead weaves a spiders web of connections between Marys own tragic life and that of her literary monster.

Liz Lochheads play Blood and Ice was first performed at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 1982. It was later revived, in a revised version, by David McVicar at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1988, and subsequently toured by McVicars company, Pen Name. It was again revived, in this published version, at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, in October 2003.

As Lochhead writes in the Introduction to this revised version of the play, the myth created by Mary Shelley remains potent for our nuclear age, our age of astonishment and unease at the fruits of perhaps-beyond-the-boundaries genetic experimentation.