Blood and Ice

Renowned poet and dramatist Liz Lochhead tells the story of Frankenstein's creation.

Summer 1816. A house party on the shores of Lake Geneva. Eighteen-year-old Mary and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, along with Mary's half-sister Claire and the infamous Lord Byron, take part in a challenge to see who can write the most horrifying story. Mary's 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 spider's web of connections between Mary's own tragic life and that of her literary monster.

Liz Lochhead's 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 McVicar's 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'.

'Thrilling... a play full of raging debates about freedom, responsibility, hedonism and privilege, about the emptiness of life without ideals and the cruelty of a life entirely driven by them'— Scotsman

“'thrilling... a play full of raging debates about freedom, responsibility, hedonism and privilege, about the emptiness of life without ideals and the cruelty of a life entirely driven by them'”

Liz Lochhead is a poet, playwright, performer and broadcaster.Her original stage plays include Thon Man Molière, Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off, Blood and Ice, Good Things and Perfect Days. Her many stage adaptations include Dracula, Molière's Tartuffe, Miseryguts (based on Le Misanthrope) and Educating Agnes (based on L'École des Femmes); as well as versions of Medea by Euripides (for which she won the Scottish Book of the Year Award in 2001), and Thebans (adapted mainly from Sophocles' Oedipus and Antigone).Her collections of poetry include Dreaming Frankenstein, The Colour of Black & White, A Choosing (Selected Poems), Fugitive Colours and True Confessions, a collection of monologues and theatre lyrics. She served a five-year term as Scotland's Makar, or National Poet, from 2011 till 2016, and was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, 2015. She won the Sunday Herald Scottish Culture Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017.

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