Last night in the bowels of the History of Science Museum we explored the damaging, dangerous and often dysfunctional relationship between science and emotion. In honour of the 200th anniversary of the publication Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the play’s writer and director, Louis Rogers, has drawn together many narrative causalities and literary archetypes to explore some of life’s fundamental dichotomies – none more so than the ultimate contradiction of a play based on the work of a romantic novelist who not only created the archetypal mad scientist but also began a whole new genre of horror writing.

Fittingly, the play is a one-woman show – an hour long monologue – where Martha Skye Murphy takes us from uptight academic through the trip of a lifetime, literally and metaphorically, to the ends of the earth and the edges of sanity. Appropriately for its Oxford setting, the play opens as the unnamed central character delivers a professorial lecture on her specialist subject – Galvanism – also a central theme in Frankenstein. The delivery is perfunctory and the logic impeccable, but asides about the perils of academia, the petty jealousies of colleagues and the ever present imperative of sacrifices to the great god funding (which clearly resonated with the Oxford audience) lead to revelations about a research trip to Antarctica and the unravelling of Martha’s character’s logical and scientific persona.

“It started with an email” … and ultimately leads not to the Artic, where Frankenstein first encounters his monster, but to the fabled island of Deception in the Antarctic, and to turn full circle back to Frankenstein our now not-so-together academic is finally rescued from the island by a suspiciously large and ill-proportioned man. The reality of the setting in academia, the Antarctic and indeed in the character’s mind is under-pinned by a subtle sound track evoking the settings and driving the dramatic narrative with the interjection of fevered phone calls to the heroine.

The play is multi-faceted and effective on many levels. First and foremost Martha gives a compelling performance, capturing the audience in her experiential and emotional dread as she disintegrates from logical scientist to emotional being, and on her return frantically trying to anchor herself to “known, knowns”. Apparently and sub-textually the play explores some large intellectual questions from a very small human perspective hung on the gossamer thread of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. So both novel and play pervade our lives. As one audience member said to me as I left “what was that all about?” And surely that is the point.