Blood and Ice Read online

  Liz Lochhead

  BLOOD AND ICE

  NICK HERN BOOKS

  London

  www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

  Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Original Production

  Characters

  Act One

  Act Two

  About the Author

  Copyright and Performing Rights Information

  BLOOD AND ICE

  Introduction

  Blood and Ice, my first play, was performed in its first full incarnation at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 1982 at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh with Gerda Stevenson perfectly cast as Mary. She was lovely. Young, heartbreakingly young was how she played it, in love with a poet and with a poetic ideal, earnest, passionately enquiring, passionately committed to living a life that secretly terrified her.

  Nevertheless, the play, even by its kindest critics – and, yes, there were some of those – could not possibly be called an unqualified success. It was far too long for one thing, and was, literally, all over the place. I, for one, must admit that I can’t, now, make head or tail of the original script, although within its excesses I can see it also contains what proved to be the still-beating heart of the whole creature, which is an exploration of the sources, and the consequences for its creator, of an enduring and immortal myth.

  Mary Godwin Shelley lived at the cusp of reason and romanticism. She was the daughter of two great Age of Reason radical philosophers of freedom: William Godwin, author of Political Justice, and Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a founding feminist who died of puerperal fever just one week after giving birth to Mary. This legacy weighed heavily upon the child. As did, later, her own female biological destiny.

  So much for free love. From the age of sixteen, when she ran away with him, married already as he was, until the death of Shelley eight years later when she was only twenty-four, she herself was almost constantly either pregnant, recovering from miscarriage or mourning the death of a child. (Only one, the delicate Percy Florence, was to survive into adulthood.) So many deaths. The suicides of her own Shelley-obsessed sister and Shelley’s deserted wife were sore enough but, far worse, the deaths of so many little innocents – their own, and the child of her stepsister and Byron too, all dragged around Europe in that ultimate romantic pursuit of their progenitors. No surprise perhaps that, prescient as she must have been – many, though not all, of these griefs lay ahead of her – this particular seventeen-year-old girl should have come up with a deep-felt fantasy of a new way of creating life. She was already, I’m sure, subconsciously aware of pushing herself beyond her own natural boundaries. Therefore the myth emerged as far from Utopian, but one of horror and terror of Science, a myth that remains potent for our nuclear age, our age of astonishment and unease at the fruits of perhaps-beyond-the-boundaries genetic experimentation.

  That garbled first script of mine nevertheless contains, more or less verbatim, many of the scenes which are still extant in this version, the umpteenth and, I have promised myself, final version, which was completed for a 2003 production in the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh instigated by, and directed by, Graham McLaren, with whom in the last decade I have collaborated on several versions of classic plays for Theatre Babel.

  Many young directors, many young actors, university students and struggling new fringe companies have, since 1982, taken on the challenge of this play. I have met quite a few since who were keen to tell me: ‘This was the first play I found for myself and just knew I had to direct it’; or ‘I played Byron’; or ‘I was Shelley’; or ‘I loved playing Mary.’ Many of these productions, the ones I saw at any rate, had wonderful moments. They’d fire me up and get it going again for me. I got on with trying to write other plays, but, all through the 1980s, like a dog returning to its own vomit, I’d go back to it, trying, abortively, to solve the problem of the structure, find what would finally seem the satisfactory form, keeping up the pursuit myself – for its own sake, whether there was an upcoming production or not – happily scribbling away through long lonely nights, just as obsessively, I had to own, as half-mad Frankenstein himself labouring with his unlovely creation, looking for the spark of life.

  That spark came towards the end of the decade when, in 1988, David McVicar, now world-famous as a director of opera, but then a second-year student at Glasgow’s Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, phoned me up and said he wanted to direct the play and had a cast together for a production at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

  I remember saying, ‘Don’t do it. Yes, it has great ideas in it, and a couple of great scenes, but it doesn’t actually work.’

  David said, ‘I know, but I think I can see what’s wrong with it. Can we have a coffee and talk?’

  I met David. Then went to a rehearsal and fell in love with the cast. It had to be a real ensemble piece and they were a real ensemble. So young, so talented and full of fire. I felt: hey, this lot might actually be about to crack it…

  They got me doing, for nothing of course, but happily, obsessively again, loads and loads of work, more midnight oil, on a new script, one very, very like this one published here.

  David McVicar’s production in its Edinburgh Fringe Scout Hall venue was thrilling. It was alive! Candlelit, and in 1960’s cheesecloth shirts and loon pants and simple long hippy-chick dresses for the girls, it had an amazing coup de théâtre when, from under the alpine peaks of an unmoving heap of muslin, the Creature, at the end of the first act, naked and beautiful as a baby, suddenly stood up and made the audience gasp – and terrified Mary into sitting down to write.

  The cast were fantastic. Wendy Seager’s Mary, Daniela Nardini’s Claire (for the first time not merely an annoying idiot of a millstone for Mary but also passionate, and pitiable, a convincingly whole, if not well-rounded, person asserting, painfully, her own right to love), John Kazek’s brooding Byron and John Straiton’s incandescent Shelley were all so young and so beautiful they had charm enough to make us actually care about this set of self-indulgent, if brilliant, adventurers.

  They were invited to perform their production at the Traverse that autumn, and RSAMD gave them leave of absence from the final year of their course to do so. It was sold out and there were queues for returns. When they had graduated, Blood and Ice was the first production of David McVicar’s far too short-lived touring company Pen Name.

  A ghost, for me, was laid to rest.

  When, half a dozen years ago, Graham McLaren came to me wanting to do Blood and Ice on the big stage of Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum, I said, ‘… yes – but, oh, it’s practically impossible to bring off, the actors must be really, really young, and also credibly these brilliant poets, and be gorgeous, and charming, especially Shelley, whom I haven’t ever managed to make so enough in the script, and they must all be human and vulnerable, even Byron – and you’ll have to make sure they find a lot of laughter and lightness in the opening scene, and some playful, joyful and easy sensuality too, because there is so little of that shown as the play begins at the point the cracks are appearing, and because there is so much darkness ahead in the journey. And, Graham, for the big stage, I’ll really have to have a wee go at the structure…’

  Graham’s production, with another lovely young cast, was very beautiful, very spooky, very romantic and made me very happy.

  It’s exactly thirty years since I first took down from a library shelf Muriel Spark’s Child of Light, her wonderful biography of Mary Shelley, and, shortly after, began my own pursuit. Could I make a play…? Naively, I was, at the time, quite blithely unaware that I wasn’t the first, and certainly wouldn’t be the last, to be fired by the dramatic possibilities of this moment in history, tha
t iconic stormy summer of 1816 by the shores of the lake and beneath the high Alps. There is, apparently, a 1969 novel called A Single Summer with L.B. by Derek Marlowe, which since someone told me about it twenty-odd years ago, I’ve always meant to read. And now that I really am finally through with these characters for myself, I will. There was a fairly terrible Ken Russell film called Gothic in 1986; and also Howard Brenton’s 1989 stage play Bloody Poetry, which focused on Shelley’s radical romantic politics – and Byron. But, as for Blood and Ice, this published version is the very last word from me on these characters, this particular dilemma.

  Unless, David McV, you know someone you can persuade this old play of mine could be a brilliant, blazing brand-new opera…?

  Liz Lochhead

  July 2009

  This version of Blood and Ice was first performed at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, on 24 October 2003, with the following cast:

  MARY SHELLEY

  Lucianne McEvoy

  SHELLEY

  Phil Matthews

  BYRON

  Alex Hassel

  CLAIRE CLAIRMONT

  Susan Coyle

  ELISE

  Michele Rodley

  Director

  Graham McLaren

  Characters

  MARY SHELLEY

  PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

  CLAIRE CLAIRMONT

  LORD BYRON

  ELISE, a maid

  THE CREATURE

  NURSE

  ACT ONE

  In an England of darkness and loneliness, MARY SHELLEY, a young widow in her late twenties, is stretched out asleep.

  The ‘nightmare is upon her’, the image is that of the famous Fuseli painting and there is perhaps an actual and physical manifestation of the smothering homunculous on her chest that appears momentarily in a flash of lightning and disappears again in the beat of darkness that follows it. Certainly, shadows move. A dream whisper breaks her sleep.

  CREATURE’S VOICE. Why did you make me?… Frankenstein?

  MARY wakes with a gasp of fear. Dead silence. She breathes, listening. Wind blows the window open, it bangs once, twice, three times. She gets up and, barefoot, pads across the floorboards to fasten it, her relief palpable.

  Ideal or important pieces of set and furniture are a double-sided oval mirror on a stand (a cheval glass) and a nightmarish perhaps oversized rocking horse. It rocks now of its own will, but when MARY turns around, it stops.

  MARY (sighing relief). Nothing.

  CREATURE’S VOICE (a whisper). Frankenstein?

  MARY. Such dreams.

  Night after night, such bad dreams.

  I go to my new book, for I will write it, I must!

  And dreams of that old one, the one that’s done and dusted, in print and out there in the world, making whatever stumbling way it can, for better or worse – dreams of my infamous creation come back to haunt me.

  Come back to haunt me and I cannot shake it off.

  I have the strongest presentiment something terrible is about to happen.

  Last night I dreamed, I dreamed I was seventeen, we were back in Poland Street, I found my little baby, my firstborn, it was not dead but… cold merely. Shelley and I rubbed it before the fire and it lived! Awoke and found no baby.

  No Shelley.

  CREATURE’S VOICE. Why?

  MARY. Don’t think of him.

  When they found him washed up, his eyes, his face, all parts of him… not protected by his clothes were eaten away, they only knew him by – in his pocket they found… that volume of Keats he carried with him always.

  Sometimes I wake up. Cold. Bathed in a moon sweat. And I rub myself slowly to life again.

  The dead of night.

  Don’t think of him.

  More movement, shadows, and suddenly:

  SHELLEY’S VOICE. Oh, Mary! You don’t seem to care how much it grieves me that you won’t sail with me…

  Come and see her.

  New arrived from Genoa, The Ariel, the bonniest boat that ever sailed the seas!

  MARY. Don’t think of him.

  She goes to her writing desk with great effort of will.

  Loud cries of ‘Mama, Mama, Mama’ and suddenly a very flesh and blood bonny wee six-year-old CHILD with girlish soft long fair hair, runs in, capering with a toy windmill or a ball, some toy in motion. MARY, laughing, runs and catches him up and tickles him. He giggles and squirms.

  Oh, Perciflo, you rascal! Your mama’s best boy, her only! What am I to do with you! Your mama is busy, she must write her new storybook and earn lots of pennies for her big bonny best boy!

  Nurse! Nurse! Come and fetch him, please!

  NURSE appears, a quick in-and-out shadow of a girl who takes the CHILD, kicking, under her arms, and exits with him. MARY calls offstage after them.

  See Percy Florence gets to bed again and has himself a proper night’s sleep – and no argument about it, my naughty little, my nice little, my naughty little man!

  Alone again, she sits at her work.

  My sweet, sweet boy, my only consolation…

  Oh, how am I to take care of you, all by myself?

  This new book of mine will save us both. Must! The Last Man… such a good fantastical idea for a philosophical and terrifying novel. If I work constantly on this one and manage a mere thousand words a day, then in only a hundred days… allow two more months for copying and revisions and… surely on the strength alone of the stir that surrounded my last publication –

  CREATURE’S VOICE. Frankenstein, why did you make me?

  MARY. Well, it wasn’t for the money anyway. Nor for the wager, or the challenge of the competition –

  Shadows move.

  BYRON’S VOICE. I’ll set us a little contest. Why should we content ourselves with translated, traditional horrors, all bookish and stilted. Home-grown ones are the best. Who can make the most stirring unnatural tale?

  MARY. There were three of us.

  SHELLEY’S VOICE. Mary!

  BYRON’S VOICE. Mary!

  CLAIRE’S VOICE (a giggle). Mary!

  MARY (as if silencing her). There were three of us!

  Shadows move.

  ELISES’S VOICE. Mrs Shelley, madame! Milord Byron’s man says he is here to fetch both the ladies –

  MARY firmly suppresses these voices from the past.

  MARY. There was Shelley… and Byron… and me.

  CREATURE’S VOICE overlaps and echoes.

  CREATURE’S VOICE. Me… Me… Me!… Tell me about the night you made me, Frankenstein.

  MARY blows out the candle, casts off her heavy, dark dressing gown and is a laughing eighteen-year-old in white muslin back in Switzerland, 1816 – summer, daytime, in a totally bright and different light. The lake and Mont Blanc above it.

  Wet and naked, capering, SHELLEY, a boy of twenty-two, wrapped only in a lace tablecloth, spins her round and kisses her.

  SHELLEY. Mary Godwin, you are such a prude! Such blushes! Come here until I kiss them better.

  MARY. Shelley, how could you? Honestly… put some clothes on.

  SHELLEY. Swimming, Mary. I want to learn to swim.

  MARY. Walking naked across the terrace, all tangled up with weeds and –

  SHELLEY. I forgot. I forgot they were coming.

  MARY. You did not! You only wanted to be outrageous –

  SHELLEY. Oh, what does it matter, Mary!

  MARY. It matters to me! She was a great friend of my mother’s.

  SHELLEY. Old humbugs, pretending to be shocked!

  MARY (fighting laughter). I thought La Gisborne would have an apoplexy!

  SHELLEY. And the other old goose! Lord, I thought she was going to burst her goitre.

  MARY (laughing). Thank goodness they’ve gone! They didn’t stay a minute after your grand apparition, though! It was make excuses and off before they’d drained their first teacup. Oh, Shelley, how could you have! Naked!

  SHELLEY. I covered myself! Just as soon as I saw you had company to
tea. I had two choices. I could brazen it out, or hide myself behind the maidservant. So I –

  MARY. What Elise must have thought I cannot imagine!

  SHELLEY. Oh, so not content with fretting over the old dowagers, now we are to agonise over the imagined offence to the servant girl! Well, at least we don’t have to worry about what the neighbours will say.

  MARY. It’s his influence makes you so careless of the regard of others!

  SHELLEY. No, Mary, you know I never cared for the world’s approval. Not in such… silly and private matters. And neither did you! The Mary I met…

  MARY. Did not go deliberately out of her way to offend elderly ladies in such… silly and trivial ways!

  SHELLEY. I covered myself. Dodging behind the maidservant, swaddling myself in her apron strings. I twirled around and, sleight of hand, snatched out the topmost tablecloth like a conjurer ere she put down the tea things and sat myself down, decently draped in dimity and lace, to adequate small talk amid the tinkling cups. I do not see how you can begin to complain of me!

  MARY. I was surprised enough when they called in the first place. You know how our position makes us vulnerable to… of course, Maria Gisborne was a follower of Mama’s, certainly she is of more liberal opinions than most middle-aged matrons, but it was kind of her to call.

  SHELLEY. Kind! Now don’t you think Mrs Gisborne might just have been moved by curiosity, not to speak of the passing expectation of perhaps a glimpse of our illustrious… no, our infamous neighbour?

  MARY. Shelley, it was very kind –!

  SHELLEY. So, they can certainly tell all the English Community that no, they never saw so much as an eyelash of Lord Byron…

  He runs to the terrace door and throws off the tablecloth.

  …but they saw every inch of Percy Shelley, the whole natural man!

  MARY. Shelley!

  SHELLEY (laughing). Mrs Gisborne! Come back! Maria! Look at me, am I not a pretty sight? Look what the sea threw up! What? You’ve never seen a naked man in all your sixty summers. She’s fainted, smelling salts? Come here, I’ll give you a sniff of the sea.