Whangārei Fringe review: Frankenstein's monster enthrals audience with festival performance To be Frank

Michael Hockey's Frank learns how to utulise his body. Photo / Supplied

As the lights go up, Frankenstein's monster finds with a roar of alarm that he is alive.

The monster, Frank, then proceeds to learn what this means in a series of agonising and ridiculous challenges: making his legs work, picking up a balloon, and discovering the audience watching him are all momentous events in his new existence.

In the discovery of a balloon, he goes on to make his first friend, experiencing love and then tragedy.

In his subsequent bumbling efforts to cope with his loss, he slowly learns the art of being alive.

Drawing on conventions of bouffon, clown and physical comedy, performer Michael Hockey tells Frank's story in larger-than-life gestures and non-verbal vocalisations, portraying his character's inarticulacy with a remarkable fluency of tones, half-syllables and expressions, and competently embodying Frank's awkward and relatable difficulties with the experience of having a body.

The notably bare stage and minimal use of props underline, if anything, the sense of starting from nothing, the raw newness of Frank's experience.

His onstage struggles are quite brilliantly underscored by the offstage live guitar accompaniment (Stenn Francis-Deare), with the combination resulting in an eloquent interplay of sound and action that is one of the show's greatest strengths.

The heart of the performance is Hockey's connection with the audience.

Frank's childlike vulnerability as he alternately marvels at and mirrors the audience serves to establish an intimacy that swiftly dispenses with any sense of self-consciousness among audience members, whose periodic spontaneous interactions with him build further on the rapport.

There are times when Hockey seems to almost slip out of character—I'm sure he's struggling not to laugh—but with a highly permeable fourth wall and the audience fully engaged, these moments barely register.

While the show is quite a departure from its inspiration, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, there's a surprising resonance between the two.

With its empathy-driven, whimsical storytelling, Hockey's performance manages to incorporate elements of the tragedy and pathos of Shelley's novel into the adventures of an absurdly funny, excruciatingly human monster.

This review was commissioned and first published on theatreview.org.nz.