Word: branagh
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...year's Pulitzer drama winner (Edward Albee's Three Tall Women) and a likely candidate for next year's prize (Terrence McNally's Love! Valour! Compassion!). Walk down 42nd Street to find the wittiest evening in town (David Ives' All in the Timing). And if you wonder what Kenneth Branagh does when he's not doing everything else, check out the U.S. premiere of his 1987 play Public Enemy...
Household names on the marquee do not, of course, guarantee dramatic splendor inside. The Branagh play is a trifle that searches for nightmare poetry in "plain old American-Irish English" and for political significance in the story of a Belfast punk (Paul Ronan) obsessed by the grit and grace of Jimmy Cagney. It finds none of the above, lost as it is in a muddle of moralizing and attitudinizing. But it shares a potent theme with the season's cannier off-Broadway ventures: that star worship is a virus, carried by the popular media and infecting anyone...
...Branagh's film, for all its transgressions, succeeds in communicating Shelley's own horror at the monstrous birth. Frankenstein's monster is neither child of God, nor of woman. He is an assault on universal order, on the principles of science and religion. This is most effectively described in the film's birth scenes. In the first, Victor Frankenstein's mother dies in caesarean delivery performed by her husband. Though physically (and graphically) destroying the mother, the birth produces a joyful child who is a delight from his first moments. The monster's birth, however, is an awkward torment...
...reaction of dread at the inevitable terrors such a brain, reanimated, will produce. Yet Karloff is at his most terrifying when he appears to be gentle, as when he plays in pure joy with the child he will soon kill. Shelley realized this, and both her monster and Branagh's display their capacity for good, before striking mercilessly into evil...
Films purporting to be inspired by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein story often reflect the fascinations and obssessions of their creators far more accurately than the text they seek to imitate. Branagh's inclusion of a plague which destroys lives even faster than his monster, speaks dirctly to modern audiences, reconnecting them to Shelley's text. A film audience would be quite surprised, having viewed the films of the Brattle series or Branagh's film, to see what the text actually says. Its power, however, lies in that very ability to inspire the imagination which makes cinematic interpretations so problematic. There...