ON 26 JULY 1814 Percy Shelley was planning to elope with two women. Two? Yes, two. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin – and her step sister Claire Clairmont as ‘chaperone’. Chaperone and maybe more.

By September 1816 ‘Shelley and his two wives’ were in Bath, where Mary spent the next five months writing FRANKENSTEIN – months as dramatic as anything in her novel

The new FRANKENSTEIN EXPERIENCE is a walking tour and visit to Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein, with complimentary cocktail on arrival.  Our reviewer Graham Wyles ventured out:

Sheila Hannon is the doyenne of street theatre. Her company, Show of Strength, has been entertaining Bristolians in pubs, bars, theatres and streets for years. The street theatre operation has been educating locals about some of the famous and infamous characters from Bristol’s past, often shining a light on neglected stories. Show of Strength has recently linked up with the Bath attraction, Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein, to bring us ‘The Frankenstein Experience’.

In a small shift to nearby Bath, Sheila Hannon has developed a show based around one of her own passions. Meeting outside the famous Sally Lunn bun shop she proceeds to take her audience around the city, stopping outside locations associated with Mary Shelly’s time there, where much of her Gothic novel, Frankenstein, was written. Of particular interest is the background to the novel, the intellectual and scientific milieu and the many influences on Mary’s young mind. The ‘experience’ is more than just a guided tour: Ms Hannon delivers the story as only an accomplished actress and Shelley fan could, with both passion and compassion for the young Mary. Due to her enthusiasm and that of others a plaque now resides outside the Pump Room, the site of the house in which Mary lived. It is one of the few references to the Shelleys in the city.

It seems that Mary’s short life was full of tragedy, which in large part was down to her lover and subsequent husband, Percy Byshe Shelley, the poet. We learned that Percy and his mate Byron were a complete shower and mucked up the lives of all the women who came under their spell, wandering around Britain and Europe leaving a trail of illegitimate babies. Ms Hannon has done her research well and recounts events with a mixture of horrified relish and disgust. At one point Percy Shelley, ever impecunious, rushes up to Ms Hannon, trying to touch her for a few bob. It was a theatrical moment made all the more potent by the incongruous setting. The other portraits of characters in Mary’s life are well drawn. I felt by the end of the tour that I had a reasonably vivid picture of a disreputable rake and a hard-done-by, devoted young woman of noble stock. In true literary sleuth style Ms Hannon teases out the threads of Mary’s time in Bath that could conceivably have found their way into the novel.

The current tour, subtitled “Sex, Lies and Electricity”, finishes at “Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein”, a building in the centre of town where we were greeted with a ‘Pink Percy’ cocktail. The Georgian era house in Gay Street has been decked out in suitably Gothic style for an immersive experience. Here we were able to follow the legacy of the novel with various exhibits detailing the afterlife of the book in cinema and wider cultural history. Some contemporary prints of Bath in the 19^th century also allow one to flesh out in a little more detail the sights we had been taken to earlier. The ‘Experience’ includes a suitably creepy room in the basement that comes with warnings for the faint hearted and the young. An escape room for the more adventurous broadens the appeal beyond the merely historical and literary whilst a screening room shows a clip from the earliest Frankenstein silent movie.

Graham Wyles, July 2024