To Kristen Smyth, Frankenstein Is a Metaphor for the Transgender Experience
Her solo show Cruel Britannia: After Frankenstein is currently running at Edinburgh Festival Fringe
Kristen Smyth
Tom Noble Creative
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Set against a canvas backdrop of sharp purple and orange shapes, some looking like claws or gnashing teeth, Kristen Smyth lays on a metal folding table. In a hospital gown, Smyth is waiting, presumably to be put under, and then to be jolted awake, brand new.
Cruel Britannia: After Frankenstein is the debut solo play by transgender playwright and performer Smyth. Set in Thatcher’s London, the poetic epic tells of hooligans and club kids wrestling for joy in a world that aims to make them, and their queerness, monstrous.
Drawing a link between Mary Shelley’s gothic novel Frankenstein and the transgender experience, Smyth, director Cohen, and a team of majority trans and nonbinary creatives have created something visceral and haunting for this year’s Fringe.
Feeling electrified by the performance, Playbill spoke to Smyth about her inspiration for the piece and road to Fringe.
How long have you been working on Cruel Britannia: After Frankenstein?
Kristen Smyth: Cruel Britannia began two years ago as an idea for a transgender adaptation of Frankenstein using the letters of Captain Walton for a starting point. Walton is trans, but dysphoric, so their letters to their sister detailing the story of Viktor Frankenstein and the Creature, was a smokescreen for their many years absence.
What is your memory of the first time you encountered Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein?
I have a weird first experiential memory of Shelley’s Frankenstein. When I was at school (a boy’s grammar school in England), I was teased as Frankie. I walked funny—I now realize I was experiencing a revulsion of my single sex and patriarchal environment. And, of course, the teasing was textually inaccurate. It’s been interesting seeing teenage males in the audience this season at the Fringe and watching some of their discomfort with the portrayal of the story. I think the articulation of fragility, especially emotional fragility, is something we need to feed into masculinity more so now than ever.
How has your relationship with the work changed as you’ve developed this piece?
My relationship with Shelley’s story has been transformative. I had never read the book until this adaptation and I was struck by the story of abandonment that the Creature experienced. The horror woven through each through line in the work was exceptional, not telegraphed, and with an escalation that gave me clues to how an adaptation could work in a 55-minute show.
Kristen Smyth
Tom Noble Creative
What was your road to Fringe?
This work has gone through the most intense drafting I’ve done yet. This is my fourth play since I graduated from Melbourne’s Victorian College of the Arts in 2019 and the second work to be performed. I’m incredibly proud of what my team has brought to Edinburgh. Cruel Britannia went through three separate dramas and 15 drafts since I began to write the play earlier this year. I think the intensity of drafting and revision and drafting again has enabled a clarity in a work that speaks to Frankenstein but does not attempt to mirror as some adaptations, Nick Dear’s and numerous TV and film works, tend to do.
Why was it important to you to showcase Cruel Britannia at the festival this year?
The attacks on the Trans and Non-Binary community and vulnerable society— be it asylum seekers, immigrants, and female Olympians during August—has created this extraordinary coalition of TERFS, fascists, and left-leaning newspapers. Like, imagine all these people in a room together. They’d eat each other alive. I often reflect on just what we’ve done to upset these people so much. If anger, bitterness, and violence are your go-to vehicles of choice to “protect” vulnerability well—I’m struck by the irony, of course, and fear for the safety of us all, including these fired up.
Let’s be clear with J.K. Rowling in particular, there’s an extraordinary level of entitlement to be “right.” Never trust anyone who comes at you with absolute certainty. It is a short walk to a fascist mentality that provides no room for difference or positions of softness and conviviality.
What do you hope audience members take away from attending?
If an audience leaves the show reflecting on what it takes to be authentic, then that’s a reaction I will take every night.
If your younger self had the opportunity to see Cruel Britannia performed, what kind of conversation do you think you’d have afterwards?
I think the show you came to was on a very special night for me. That night I was reflecting on an anniversary 21 years to the day before that show. I had my last drop of alcohol on August 8, 2003. I was blackout drunk in Notting Hill, turfed out of a taxi at Hammersmith station, and told by a cab driver that I was a mess. I haven’t had a drink since that day, and I was honoring the journey it’s taken for me to go from my younger self to performing this work at Fringe this year. It’s a story of transformation and courage. But it’s also a story of seeking and finding truth. I’d like to think we all have capacity for that in our lives. It’s not easy, but it’s damn well worth it.
Cruel Britannia: After Frankenstein runs at theSpace on the Mile until August 17. Tickets are available here.
