The Wake

The corpse of a fan dancer announces the end of the world in the first act of Clive Barker’s Frankenstein in Love. The bodiless head of a middle-aged man is stabbed for refusing to silence his screams, and a “Bogey Man” shows up in the aftermath of a bloody South American revolution to take control of the tiny nation in which this play is set. Curious commencement for what playwright Barker calls a “romance.”

“For me it’s a mix between a Wildean comedy, and Titus Andronicus,” says Nic Hager, director of the Xperimental Theatre’s production of Frankenstein in Love, and a third-year theatre student here at the “U.” Hager initially chose the play because it is his favorite theatrical text and he has “read it more times than I care to remember. I have worn my way through many copies of Clive Barker’s book Incarnations, in which the play was published.”

Some of Barker’s other works include his recent novel Galilee and the Hellraiser movies—yes, the ones about that guy with the needles in his head and the box that brings him to life. While the poetic sentiments (if there are any) of Hellraiser may be obscured by laughable special effects and cheesy dialogue, Hager says that Barker’s work has matured throughout his career.

“I really want to bring the maturity and refined sensibilities inherent in Clive Barker’s more recent work, such as his novel Galilee, to the script [of Frankenstein in Love],” says Hager. The script was actually written decades ago, when Barker was still running around London during his early twenties.

“Usually when this play is produced, it’s done around Halloween and it focuses on the gore and spectacle in the script. I’ve been working to strip down the spectacular aspects of the script, and focus on the heart of the piece. It is the quest for humanity which drives the characters,” explains Hager. “What does it mean to be human?” The play will certainly have less of an emphasis on the extraordinary in the X Theatre than previous productions, but the nature of the text demands that there still be an element of the bizarre. Hager hopes that the audience will be able to see past that and into the minds of the characters.

“The characters struggle to understand themselves, and to be understood by others,” he says. “I’m hoping to thrust the audience into the dark world that Clive Barker has written, and once they become comfortable with the characters, to understand and sympathize with their journeys.”