Given the overly sexualised nature of today's society, children aren't going to be fazed by Frankenstein
Sombre news for fans of Mary Shelley who have the misfortune to be under 15 years old. Tickets for Danny Boyle's compelling, justifiably acclaimed production of Frankenstein, which boasts yet more teen favourites in the shape of Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller, are not just surpassingly rare when they are not being touted at more than four times their face value, but officially discouraged for younger enthusiasts, this Frankenstein being described as "suitable only for 15+".
As one of those bad mothers who only wishes that those infant high heels and amusing baby-grows saying "Future Porn Star" had been around when they were needed ? what they can't read, can't hurt them, right? ? I failed to spot the age warning and took a 13-year-old to see Frankenstein. And, frankly, when you think of Rihanna's latest video, Lady Gaga's ditto or, for that matter, the ENO's Lucrezia Borgia smutfest, featuring videos by Mike Figgis, the man they call opera's Uncle Perv, it was a great disappointment, porn-wise. All that money spent on lighting and sets, instead of models acting dirty, � la Figgis? No Figgisy humping and gynaecological explorations in the masterly, Ken Russell manner, filmed in a genuine Renaissance setting instead of a boring old theatre? Not one single prostitute on a lead, to give a flavour of how life was really lived in 1818?
Offered a chance to jolt middle-class art-lovers out of their prudish, fat-bottomed complacency, one the dashing Figgis seized with aplomb, Boyle has, instead, created a production which, along with great thoughtfulness about the novel, currently a GCSE set text, delivers just about every captivating technical trick you could imagine: rain, gullies, a revolving mansion, an island, a lake, a great tolling bell, a full-size train, 'orrible surprises. That is just one respect in which this production might have been designed to further National Theatre director Nicholas Hytner's ambition "to unlock what can be a forbidding exterior and let both light and the public flood in".
So it is hard to see why the theatre decided to exclude so many potential converts, unless it was a fear of how younger teens might react to the first 20 minutes, in which the piteous monster comes to life and learns to wriggle, then stagger, completely naked until his maker chucks him a large cloak. But if it was not, generously, to spare audiences and actors the collective sniggers, as representatives of the Hollyoaks cohort take in the reality of an unadorned Cumberbatch ? a school matinee obviously does not even bear even thinking about ? then why keep them out?
One of the great benefits of a modern education is that, unlike earlier generations, today's parents can be sure that a pubescent girl will know that the lower half of a naked man does not, or only rarely, resemble that of the male rabbit. There is no need, though one cannot speak for faith schools, for the kind of excruciating explanations once prompted by an unexpected rape scene in The Forsyte Saga.
What, you sometimes wonder, don't children know? Most tots, asked for the rudest word they have ever heard on the Today programme, will confidently disclose that it begins with a K. Add to that all the insights filtering through from East-Enders, Skins, Facebook, YouTube, iPlayer and their porned-up little chums on the bus, comparing notes on Billie Piper, and what is left to tell by the time most adolescents are 13 or much younger? Although admittedly, pregnant teen Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin did not lag far behind: she ran away with the married Shelley at the age of 16.
At the National Theatre, a spokeswoman says that the age restriction was decided in collaboration with Boyle; they chose to "err on the side of caution". "Because it contains nudity and a rape scene," she says, "it seemed like a sensible decision." Persistent customers are, it turns out, free to discuss the age restriction with the box office and reach a different view ? there is no cinema-style enforcement. And no doubt such caution is to be encouraged: we can only imagine how different life might be if it had been applied, long ago, to The Story of Tracy Beaker. Sherlock is watched by thousands of innocents and no director who has witnessed the power of Mumsnet, once enough of its members have taken against an EastEnders storyline, a missing child advertisement or some of those hard-to-find pornographic babyclothes, would wish to be at the receiving end of its righteous anger, all the more so if the Daily Mail has endorsed the outrage.
If the director-general of the BBC could be made to grovel for a baby-swap plotline borrowed from the Old Testament, there would be no difficulty in embarrassing a publicly subsidised production such as Frankenstein which, as well as naked adults, also features a stylised rape that may be slightly more graphic than the Forsyte grapple watched by 8 million people, although notably less disturbing and self-indulgent than the sexual imagery and violence that, in the absence of any comprehensible dialogue, captivated so many of the family audiences of Tim Supple's celebrated Midsummer Night's Dream.
In 2007, members of a disappointed Newcastle school outing were made to look like peasants for their sense of humour failure over Supple's production, which came with no age restrictions: Bottom's gigantic, humorously erect gourd is among several memories I have yet successfully to repress.
At the National also, age guidelines seem once to have been more permissive. Highlights of Coram Boy, its 2005 Christmas production, featured murdered newborns, a hanging, a sexual encounter and dead puppet babies rising from their graves: the rating was 12+. Elsewhere, the 2007 production of Equus in which the pubescents' idol, Daniel Radcliffe, doggedly put horses' eyes out and took off all his clothes, received an age restriction of 8+. In the cinema, unlovely sexual episodes in The Social Network and severed fingers in a violent True Grit still allow classifications, for each, of 12A. As for fiction, veterans of unrated teenage novels, with their now statutory themes of exclusion, criminality, underage sex, addiction, family collapse and the moral consequences of living in a cruel and Godless universe, may feel that Dr Frankenstein's hubris in playing God is a question they left behind in Balamory.
Justified or not, the National's extreme solicitousness about nudity might not be unrelated to a growing adult panic about premature sexualisation which, despairing at the tide of pornography, repeatedly fixates on banning or suppressing the wrong or most trivial things, from lurid stories to slutty dollies and trashy children's clothes which enrage parents who would never buy them anyway. But inconsistency has its consolations.
Denied a trip to Frankenstein? Stay at home and watch The Joy of Teen Sex on 4 on Demand: "Full-frontal nudity, graphic sexual content and strong language from the start and throughout."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/27/catherine-bennett-frankenstein-children
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