Frankenstein, Unstitched: An Evening with Director Aidan O’Reilly

In 1816, eighteen-year-old Mary Godwin spent a stormy summer at a villa on Lake Geneva, where a group of friends challenged one another to write a ghost story. She already knew a great deal about loss. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died just eleven days after Mary was born, and Mary’s own first child had died the year before. Her ghost story became Frankenstein, a tale about making life and then abandoning what you have made. Two centuries on, the story keeps being retold. It reached the London stage in 1823, five years after publication, and became Boris Karloff’s iconic flat-topped Creature in the 1931 Universal film. The reinventions continue, from Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025) to Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! (2026). Each version reflects something about the era that creates it. David Catlin’s adaptation, now playing at the Blackfriars Playhouse, puts Mary back in the room. She tells her tale to the people who surrounded her that extraordinary summer, while Percy Shelley steps into Victor Frankenstein’s role. Join Aidan O’Reilly, director of the ASC production, for a conversation about the woman behind the monster, how the story has changed over time, and the choices behind this staging. Aidan is an actor, writer, and musician, and the first visually impaired graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He has performed with Shakespeare companies across the country and abroad, and he is a longtime member of the American Shakespeare Center’s artistic community.