Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (NHB Modern Plays)

Rona Munro has written extensively for stage, radio, film and television including the award winning plays Iron, Bold Girls and The Maiden Stone. Other plays include Long Time Dead produced by Paines Plough Theatre Company and The Indian Boy produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company and adaptations Mary Barton and Watership Down which were produced by Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre and the Lyric Hammersmith. Film and television work includes the Ken Loach film Ladybird Ladybird, Aimee and Jaguar and television dramas Rehab and BAFTA nominated Bumping The Odds for the BBC. She has also written many other single plays for radio and television and contributed to series such as Casualty and Dr Who. Rona Munro is one of Scotland's leading writers. Her play The Last Witch premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival 2009 while her translation of Federico García Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba was first presented at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, on 17 September 2009, by the National Theatre of Scotland, and subsequently toured to the Dundee Rep Theatre, the Alhambra Theatre, Dunfermline, and the King's Theatre, Edinburgh.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born on August 30, 1797, into a life of personal tragedy. In 1816, she married the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and that summer traveled with him and a host of other Romantic intellectuals to Geneva. Her greatest achievement was piecing together one of the most terrifying and renowned stories of all time: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Shelley said she conceived of Frankenstein in “a waking dream.” This vision was simply of a student kneeling before a corpse brought to life. Yet this tale of a mad creator and his abomination has inspired a multitude of storytellers and artists. She died on February 1, 1851.