Blood and Ice

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 - Frankenstein

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

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" ~ Joyce McMillan, Scotsman