Toronto Fringe Review: Monster Theatre delivers a deliciously funny and surprisingly heartfelt origin story behind literature’s very first vampire
By Ross
My last show at the Toronto Fringe Festival also was my most spontaneous. Realizing I had an hour and a half before heading to Outside the March and Soulpepper‘s Medusa, I couldn’t imagine simply sitting around when another Fringe discovery was waiting just down the hall. That impulse paid off beautifully. Monster Theatre‘s The First Vampire dusts off literary history, turns it upside down, and reveals a deliciously engaging secret hiding in plain sight.
Written and directed by Ryan Gladstone (Monster’s Juliet: A Revenge Comedy), the play imagines the combustible reunion between Lord Byron and his long-suffering physician John Polidori long after that legendary gathering on Lake Geneva that also gave birth to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Madeleine Humeny and Rebecca Wass are perfectly matched, creating a wonderfully sharp comic partnership built on Byron’s glorious self-importance and Polidori’s simmering frustration. Their exchanges crackle with wit, but beneath the laughs sits a relationship filled with resentment, admiration, dependence, and perhaps even something neither of them fully understands. At one point, the accusation that one is “the vampire who lives off” the other lands as one of the evening’s funniest moments while exposing the complicated dependence at the heart of their relationship.
Monster Theatre gleefully fills the hour with inventive theatrical flourishes that make literary history feel wonderfully alive even as the characters stand before us as ghosts. Clever shadow puppetry briefly summons Frankenstein into existence, flashes of lightning and dramatic underscoring give the evening an appropriately gothic pulse, and the production embraces the joyful resourcefulness that Fringe theatre does so well. Every theatrical trick feels like another page being torn from an old horror novel, adding just enough magic to a story that already seems almost impossible to believe. After only an hour in their company, it becomes easy to understand why Monster Theatre has remained a Toronto Fringe favourite for so many years.
For all its irreverent humour, The First Vampire never loses sight of the forgotten figure standing in Byron’s enormous shadow. By the end, the play has done something rather lovely. It gives John Polidori his voice back while celebrating the strange collision of personalities that changed literary history forever. Like the very best Fringe discoveries, it sends you out laughing, thinking, and suddenly wanting to revisit stories you thought you already knew.
