The first time Jeremiah Wray saw himself in full prosthetics he couldn’t comprehend what he was seeing. “It’s such an odd feeling standing in front of a mirror and not recognising yourself within your own reflection.” Wray’s transformation is an essential part of playing The Creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , a story about ambition gone awry.
In both the novel and the stage play, Dr Frankenstein sets out to create a superior being, crafted out of a jigsaw of body parts, and brings it to life. What Frankenstein ends up creating, however, horrifies and repulses him, and he rejects it. Special effects artist Steve Boyle applies prosthetics to Frankenstein actor Jeremiah Wray.
Credit: Glenn Hunt Following a well-received season in Brisbane last year, the production is heading to Melbourne this month. The push and pull between pity and horror is a vital part of the unfolding narrative. Director Nick Skubij needed The Creature to feel real and visceral, and to achieve this they needed to get the look just right.
“We didn’t want to put him in a bodysuit ...
that had just pictures of stitches and things on him,” Skubij explains. “We wanted it to feel like it was flesh.” It should feel so real the audience winces with The Creature’s pain.
So they brought in veteran special effects artist Steve Boyle. “Frankenstein’s monster is on every makeup effects artist’s bucket list ..
. It’s the ultimate monster to make,” says Boyle. This production “created the perfect balance between horror, beauty and psychology – allowing me to design a monster that the audience had total empathy for”.
When Wray signed on to the show he knew it was “going to be a hell of a journey to create this kind of monstrosity on stage” both in character interpretation and look. Crafting the specialist prosthetics for The Creature required a cast to be made of Wray. Credit: Joel Devereux To create the specialised prosthetics “they put straws up my nose, they covered my whole upper body in this plaster cast, and you’re just in this silent darkness for an hour waiting for this thing to set,” he recalls.
“I never really realised I had many anxieties until that moment.” he adds with a laugh. For each show he takes a few hours to be made up and another hour afterwards to have everything removed.
“It’s funny – in the first season that we did, because I arrive and I’m ready before everyone else, and everyone leaves before I’m out of costume, we found for about two weeks, people hadn’t seen my actual face.” Loading Though written more than 200 years ago, the themes of Frankenstein , disturbingly, endure. Skubij points to the ongoing question of whether just because we can do something, should we? “It speaks to our conversations around artificial intelligence at the moment, too, and the moral obligations about creating man-made things that are going to potentially supersede the role or the usefulness of man,” he says.
“They’re classics for a reason, and I think, as much as you’d like to say, I think we’ve learned some things. I don’t think we’ve learned everything.” Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by Shake & Stir is on at the Princess Theatre from August 23 to September 1 and Theatre Royal Sydney from September 28 to October 13.
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License this article Arts What’s on See & Do Performing arts For subscribers Elizabeth Flux is Arts Editor at The Age. Connect via Twitter or email . Most Viewed in Culture Loading.
