Frankenstein's Wedding Kirkstall Abbey Leeds

This televised performance event took place at Kirkstall Abbey on Saturday March 19th and adapted Shelley's gothic novel into something which aptly but unintentionally had a bit of an identity crisis. Great venue, great scenery, great set and effects, but then again the Abbey was taken over by the set builders and crew for about two weeks beforehand.

The problem was that the show was unsure whether it was a Leeds city council event like Opera in the Park or a television show or whether it was a musical event or a drama or a dramatic comedy. Different elements of the event were sewn together with the slightly over-enthusiastic crowd-rousing compere-ing that we get at Classical Fantasia and Opera in the Park with musical interludes shoehorned inbetween rather hammy acting and ocassionally rather embarrassed looking actors who obivously knew that the whole thing was off kilter. In short the whole thing was sewn together like a badly constructed Frankenstein's monster flailing around trying to figure out what media it belonged to, what genre it was and who it's audience were.

All this I got from the first eight minutes on the television before I was too nauseated to go on. It was a misguided pastiche of media and types of entertainment which tried far too hard to please the crowd and the viewer at home, and like all ungodly creatures desperately searching for a sense of place and belonging doomed to failure. I'm sure that everyone held up their end and did their jobs adequately and even well, but ultimate responsibility has to rest with the producer who cobbled this together - they really should have known so much better.