The 1931 movie Frankenstein plays silently on the back wall: black and white, stiff and formal. The sound is cut from the movie and emerges instead from underneath a leering, latex mask. Dressed head to platform-heeled toe as Frankenstein’s monster, performance artist Hester Stefan Chillingworth live-dubs the 70-minute movie. Breathing heavily under the mask, they perform every role and many of the soundtrack’s accompanying whirs, clanks and crashes.
It’s a slow and stomping experiment. The impact of Chillingworth’s imitations isn’t in the skill of their mimicry, but the relentless nature of the performance within the restrictive green costume. While the lack of score makes much of the movie appear as a comedy, the whole piece becomes an act of struggle as they pant to keep up.
Tiring of the heavy, rubbery disguise, they slowly peel off layers. The foam padding around their shoulders comes off and we see their wrists painted green at the edges of their gloves, their tattoos and scars from top surgery. By wedding the movie’s monster to a trans body, Chillingworth reframes the heavily judgmental narrative around bodies that have undergone surgery. The meaning of some of the script’s lines around fear and cruelty shift, challenging where in the story monstrosity really lies.
Their intervention in the story is light touch, their performance tinged with exhaustion as well as a sense of release. Throughout, Chillingworth’s dubbing comes a step after the moving mouths on screen, the timing of the creature a heartbeat behind. But, a handful of times as they roam the stage, shoulders hunched and knees bent, it’s as if the creature is controlling what is on the screen. They are telling a scary story of a cruel gang of ignorant strangers. The flickering images behind are simply helping to illustrate the horror.
At Camden People’s theatre, London, until 3 November
