Genre:

Ballet

Release Date:

Feb 2017

Sound Format:

LPCM 2.0 & DTS 5.1 Digital Surround (DVD) LPCM 2.0, DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio, Dolby Atmos (Blu-ray)

Catalog Number:

OA1231D

Scarlett: Frankenstein (The Royal Ballet)

Federico Bonelli (Victor); Laura Morera (Elizabeth); Steven McRae (The Creature); Bennet Gartside (Alphonse Frankenstein); Christina Arestis (Caroline Beaufort); Elizabeth McGorian (Madame Moritz); Meaghan Grace Hinkis (Justine Moritz); Alexander Campbell (Henry Clerval); Thomas Whitehead (The Professor); Guillem Cabrera Espinach (William Frankenstein); Sacha Barber (Young Victor); Skya Powney (Young Elizabeth);

Royal Ballet Principals Federico Bonelli, Laura Morera and Steven McRae dance the lead roles in Liam Scarlett’s new ballet, based on the world’s most famous work of horror fiction, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. This ambitious theatrical collaboration brings the novel to life with spectacular period sets and costumes by John Macfarlane and a newly commissioned score by Lowell Liebermann. Scarlett’s choreography draws out the emotional power of this classic story. Passionate encounters between Victor, Elizabeth and the Creature express their torment, regret, anger, yearning and love.

Reviews

"McRae’s portrayal is brilliant; his dancing is eloquent in its anguish, and we sense every beat of his lonely, vengeful heart...." (The Observer)

"If nothing else in the scary world of dance making, a three act ballet separates the men from the boys. And Frankenstein, premiered last Wednesday, locks the Royal Ballet’s artist in residence Liam Scarlett well and truly in the men’s sector. ... And what dancers! Laura Morera played Elizabeth, the hero’s love interest, and I have never seen her dance better. She brilliantly captured the character’s middle class niceness and the wonder of a young woman’s unqualified first love... Steven McRae as The Creature somehow got us on his side as soon as he was conjured up, naked and gruesomely slashed. The Creature is lost in the who, what and why of being in the world. It takes a special talent to transmit uncontrollable striving to understand the mess he is in without bathos and overplaying and McRae, despite The Creature’s historic notoriety and reputation, never teetered over the top into bad taste... But the star of the evening, giving flesh and blood reality to Scarlett’s superb dance making, was the man in the title role, Federico Bonelli." (The Sunday Express ★★★★)

"The production has a cinematographic quality — not only from the projections and painterly sets (the scene in the bar with the medical students and attendant prostitutes could have been taken directly from Hogarth), but the adept way in which this classic plot is spun onstage." (The Londonist ★★★★)