It’s Back! ‘Frankenstein: How To Make A Monster’ Blows Minds at Hackney Empire, Now Heads to Canterbury on UK/Ireland Tour

A week last Friday, at Hackney Empire (the legendary Grade II listed theatre in east London), BAC Beatbox Academy, a group of young beatboxers, singers and rappers based in Battersea Arts Centre in south west London brought back to life their show ‘Frankenstein: How to Make a Monster’, the top-rated show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2019, which was in the early stages of a British Council-backed world tour — having wowed the Adelaide Fringe in February and March 2020 — when Covid hit, and everything ground to a halt.

The performance at Hackney Empire on March 11 — when the theatre, with support from Hackney Council, put it on as a free performance for 11-18 year olds — marked its return after two years, and it was a raging, resounding success.

Devised over two years (from 2016 to 2018) by six members of the Beatbox Academy (including my son Tyler), under the direction of Beatbox Academy founder Conrad Murray and visiting director David Cumming, and with wonderfully powerful choreography and lighting, the show takes the themes of Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’, and, eschewing a linear narrative, updates them via reflections on alienation and the dangerous power of social media in a largely impressionistic manner.

Giant beats, sonic landscapes and soaring vocals — with every sound produced solely by the six performers’ voices — take the audience on a journey that is, by turns, hilarious, bleak and emotional. There are laments, poetic reflections, a mash-up of classic tunes, a beatbox battle, a rave, and some tunes so poignant, or so sharp that you immediately want them on your playlist.

It remains fair to say, as I did when I first wrote about it back in 2018, that nothing like this has been done before — and it still hasn’t. When the arrival of Covid pressed the ‘pause’ button on large-scale live performance two years ago, no one had caught up, and they still haven’t. Now that the ‘play button’ has been pressed again, I can only urge you to go and see it if you can.

A UK and Irish tour starts in Canterbury on March 29, and I’m listing dates and locations below. If you get the chance to see it, don’t miss it! The performances will feature some or all of the six performers who wowed Edinburgh and Adelaide in 2019 and 2020 — Aminita (Aminita Francis), Glitch (Nadine Rose Johnson), Wiz-RD (Tyler Worthington), ABH (Alex Hackett), Native the Cre8ive (Nathaniel Forder-Staple), and Grove (Beth Griffin) — although as the original six are not always available because of other commitments, six understudies trained hard in the fortnight before the Hackney show, and some of them will be appearing instead.

At Hackney, for example, Apollo (Alex Hardie) and 19-year old newcomer Aziza (Aziza Amari Brown) got their first opportunity to perform the show live, and Aziza in particular will be standing in regularly for Grove, who has a busy few months ahead touring as a solo musician. The tour will also feature local performers, fresh from taking part in BAC Beatbox Academy workshops, and each performance will also end with beatbox battles and a circle jam, when the performers, conducted by Conrad, improvise new beats and tunes on the spot.

‘Frankenstein: How to Make a Monster’: UK and Ireland tour dates 2022

Tuesday March 29 to Sunday April 3: Gulbenkian Arts Centre, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NB. Details here.

Wednesday April 20 to Saturday April 30: The Gate Theatre, Cavendish Row, Parnell Square, Dublin, Ireland. Details here.

Tuesday May 10 to Saturday May 14: Contact, Oxford Road, Manchester M15 6JA. Details here.

Wednesday May 25 to Saturday May 28: Warwick Arts Centre, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL. Details here.

That’s it for now, but there will be more to come, including, I’m sure, some more foreign trips in 2023!

For a taste of what to expect, check out the trailer below for the BBC adaptation of ‘Frankenstein: How To Make A Monster’, which was broadcast on BBC4 in October 2020.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the struggle for housing justice — and against environmental destruction — continues.

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