Something to watch tonight: Thursday 10 October

NT Live: Frankenstein (Boyle, 2011)

If your loc­al cinema is one that plays the NT Live series of recor­ded theatre pro­duc­tions you should see if they are play­ing Danny Boyle’s excel­lent pro­duc­tion of Frankenstein from 2011 as it has a return sea­son this week. 

Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller swapped the lead­ing roles of Dr. Frankenstein and the Monster on altern­ate nights and both ver­sions are out there.

I reviewed it for RNZ At the Movies dur­ing one of the lock­downs in September 2021:

If you haven’t seen sub­sid­ised British theatre in its pomp, you will be amazed at the pro­duc­tion val­ues on dis­play in this show. The giant Olivier Theatre has a size and scale that in New Zealand we nor­mally devote to pub­lic car park­ing buildings.

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What I can only describe as a cork­screw revolving stage with huge set ele­ments rising up from the floor as the stage spins; and all the ele­ments fea­ture on stage – earth, fire, water. The design by Mark Tildesley and cos­tumes by Sattirat Anne Larlarb have a steam­punk aes­thet­ic which was in vogue at the time but looks slightly out of date now.

The plot hews pretty closely to Mary Shelley’s nov­el. Victor Frankenstein, obsessed with the elec­tro­chem­ic­al prop­er­ties of life, con­structs a creature from scav­enged body parts and man­ages to awaken it. Horrified by what he has made, Frankenstein aban­dons the creature who is forced to learn the ways of men while at the same time being scorned and des­pised by them.

But he is a quick learner and after a year liv­ing with a blind philo­soph­er in the Swiss moun­tains – a sojourn that does not end well – the Creature determ­ines to go to Geneva and reck­on with his cre­at­or, and bar­gain for a com­pan­ion. This also does not go well.

If you can’t get to a cinema before this re-release dis­ap­pears, you can do what we did back in 2021 and watch it on the NT Live home stream­ing ser­vice where there are cur­rently 91 dif­fer­ent pro­duc­tions to choose from.

And you can listen to the whole review here (8m 11s). Also in that whole pro­gramme: Netflix drum­ming doc­u­ment­ary Count Me In, Soderbergh’s Atlantic cross­ing drama Let Them All Talk and the clas­sic Field of Dreams.

Where to watch Frankenstein

Worldwide: Streaming on National Theatre At Home. Also in select cinemas for a lim­ited time – check your listings.

Favourite comments

Reader BF of Twizel respon­ded to yesterday’s recom­mend­a­tion of Sunny on Apple TV+: “Fyi our own Wētā Workshop worked on Sunny (the show and the robot)”

Reader HG of Wellington went to see Joker: Folie à Deux: “I went and saw Joker – Folies à Deux as a big fan of the first movie. TBH it’s not as bad as the reviews say – the music­al pieces could have been eas­ily removed and it would have been a good movie.”

And read­er MN chose to hon­our our 300^th edi­tion by going to see The Substance: “Holy s#!t. Honestly. Holy f@%$!ng s#!t.” That’s a small clip from a long com­ment. I’ll wait for The Substance to appear at home, I think.

Further reading

RNZ gave me an oppor­tun­ity to give my review of Joker: Folie à Deux a bit of a pol­ish. It got picked up by the NZ Herald, too. Which was nice.