Slumdog millionaires: National Theatre’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers (NTLive)

Better known for his political plays, British playwright David Hare has turned to Katherine Boo’s account of life under a Mumbai flight path in Behind the Beautiful Forevers to create an epic piece of theatre, whose scale and integrity is clearly defined at the outset and maintained throughout. And while its story is compelling, it lacks the strong emotional pull which is so present in some of Hare’s other plays, the hook which would make us care more about the plight of these characters, these people.

Sea-fairing: National Theatre’s Treasure Island (NTLive)

I remember reading Treasure Island when I was younger, shivering in excitement as Long John Silver swept the crew of the Hispaniola into his murky plans. I remember Captain Flint (Silver’s parrot), Jim Hawkins the cabin-boy, the blind man tap-tapping his cane in the darkness, the dreaded black spot, finding the wild man Ben Gunn on the island… But strangely enough, I don’t really remember the story at all. More recently, I read Andrew Motion’s Silver, the 'return to Treasure Island', but that felt more like seeing something familiar refracted through an endless mirror and trying to piece it all back together. But here, in this production by London’s National Theatre, Treasure Island springs into full-blooded thrilling life, and is much darker and far more mercurial than I ever remember it.

Pandemonium: National Theatre's Frankenstein (NTLive)

We all know Frankenstein’s monster – the block head, the shock of dark hair on its flat top, the bolts in the neck, the ill-fitting clothes, the immense iron shoe-clad feet, the lumbering gait, arms outstretched. We erroneously call this monstrosity ‘Frankenstein,’ not realising that is actually the name of the scientist who created him; the creature is, in fact, unnamed, although as this production illustrates so clearly, both creature and scientist are two halves of one being – creator and created – thus the title of Frankenstein being applicable to both man and creature. But underneath the myth and horror-appropriation of the story is Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, and this production – created for London’s National Theatre in 2011 – springs forth from Shelley’s novel into full-blooded life, first upon the stage and now upon cinema screens as part of the popular National Theatre Live program.

First published in January 1818 when Mary Shelley was twenty years old and pregnant herself, the novel is often credited as the first work of science-fiction. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the age of science was beginning – surgeons and anatomists were plumbing the human body for its secrets and workings, the discovery of electricity was almost visible on the horizon, and the modern world was about to explode in all its hulking smoking burning glory into full being through the Industrial Revolution. There was much less of a distinction between art and science as we know them today, and for many writers and thinkers of the time, the two were intertwined. At the heart of Shelley’s Frankenstein is not Hollywood’s idea of horror, but a very morbid and human fear of being born.