Conductor(s):
Koen Kessels

Orchestra(s):
The Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Artist(s):
Laura Morera; Federico Bonelli; Steven McRae; Bennet Gartside; Christina Arestis; Elizabeth McGorian; Meaghan Grace Hinkis; Alexander Campbell; Thomas Whitehead; Guillem Cabrera Espinach; Sacha Barber; Skya Powney; The Orchestra of the Royal Opera House; Koen Kessels

"There’s a riveting scene in the final act of Liam Scarlett’s Frankenstein where Elizabeth (Laura Morera), the young wife of Victor Frankenstein (Federico Bonelli), is left alone with the creature (Steven McRae) that her husband has created. Wide-eyed, almost fainting with dread, Morera allows herself to be led through a classical pas de deux. We know, and she knows, that at the dance’s conclusion, the creature will kill her. McRae plays with Morera like a cat with a mouse, dancing between ironic courtesy and visceral savagery. We feel her terror, her blood turning to glue.
This subversion of form, romantic dream into lethal nightmare, is pure gothic. Equal in their imaginative potency are the duets between McRae and Bonelli. Victor has brought the creature to life, but then, horrified by his creation, has abandoned him. With pitiful desperation, the creature begs his creator for kinship. McRae is all pleading, reptilian need, winding himself around Bonelli with quasi-erotic suggestiveness, and even after murdering half his family, seems to beg him to recognise their affinity. These exchanges, as technically accomplished as they are emotionally intense, show that Scarlett is a choreographer to be reckoned with....
John Macfarlane’s set for the university anatomy theatre is magnificent, and Thomas Whitehead’s mad, rationalist professor a terrifyingly grim creation. Much fun is had with dancing nurses nonchalantly arranging body parts....
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 ★★★★)

"Royal Ballet's Frankenstein Is Brilliantly Brutal - Stephen McRae's Creature is anatomical perfection itself, but his raw-seamed flesh is clearly full of pain, not only physical, but also the anguish of longing for the love and approval of his creator.
He isn't the only character torn with emotion; Frankenstein exemplifies successive states of scientific rapture, revulsion and grief. And when his bride-to-be, Elizabeth (Laura Morera) is confronted by the Creature, there is a palpable vortex of fear as she systemically tries, and fails, to escape.
Some of the dance veers so much into a strong emotional state, it becomes almost brutal to watch, such as the pas de deux of Frankenstein and the Creature near the fiery finale. But then Frankenstein was never meant to make easy viewing.
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 ★★★★)