2016’s Keats-Shelley Awards were launched in style when acclaimed actors Damian Lewis and Helen McCrory gave a special reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. To mark the 200th anniversary of Mary’s Gothic masterpiece, the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association had invited Romantics, old and young, to contribute poems on the subject ‘After Frankenstein’.
And so it was on the morning of the annual Keats-Shelley Awards, held on 13th April at the Royal Festival Hall, Prize-winners, journalists and judges gathered at 50 Albemarle Street to enjoy a Frankenstein breakfast: coffee, pastries, fruit and – appropriately – ‘Bloody Marys’. Albemarle Street was not only the former offices of John Murray’s publishers, it was the place at which Murray infamously burned Byron’s memoirs on 17th May 1824.
Once the winners of the Keats-Shelley Prizes were announced, Damian Lewis and Helen McCrory recreated with consummate skill the genesis of Mary’s extraordinary creation. The performance took place under the discriminating gaze of Lord Byron, or at least his portrait.
As Richard Holmes, Keats-Shelley’s Prize Chairman, said: ‘Mary’s story of Frankenstein and his monstrous creation has always had a strange power to set people’s imaginations on fire…’ Helen McCrory, as Mary, was superb: ‘I busied myself to think of a story…which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror…’ Her words seemed to prompt Damian Lewis, playing Shelley, to open a Pandora’s box in which he saw his own face in that of the ‘cursed creature.’
It was an extraordinary day. An exhibition included two pages from Mary Shelley’s original notebook, with annotations by Shelley himself, and a copy of Frankenstein dedicated to Byron by its author. Later, Pele Cox, with Jay Villiers, Nick Rowe and Richard Goulding, gave four performances by candlelight of her dramatic evocation of that haunted evening. The day was perhaps best summarised by the journalist Boyd Tonkin: ‘the whole event was like having steak tartare for breakfast – rich and raw.’
Watch footage of Damian Lewis and Helen McCrory on the Guardian’s website: goo.gl/UY9Adk
Read a report in the TLS blog: http://goo.gl/q8lUmY
There was even interest in the Beijing News: http://goo.gl/zJqIGU
