The ‘Romanticism Now’ series on the BARS Blog discusses where Romanticism pops up in contemporary culture. In this instalment, Chloe Wilcox (BARS Communications Fellow) looks at 1816: The Year Without a Summer. If you would like to write for ‘Romanticism Now’ or any other of our blog series, please send us an email at britishassociationromantic@gmail.com.
The summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati has spawned a number of biopics and fictionalisations. Gothic was released in 1986 and Mary Shelley in 2017. One of Hugh Grant’s earliest film appearances was as Lord Byron in Rowing with the Wind (1988), and the same year saw Alex Winter play John William Polidori in Haunted Summer. A recent addition to this tradition is 1816: The Year Without a Summer, a new musical written and composed by Nat Riches and Natasha Atkinson and directed by Gina Stock. After an initial run at the Camden Fringe (6th-7th August 2025), they have moved to the Lion & Unicorn Theatre in Kentish Town (30th September-4th October) and will soon be performing at Cambridge’s ADC Theatre (15th-18th October). A few hours before seeing the show myself on 30th September, I met up with the writers, Nat and Natasha, in a café to chat about it.
They decided to write a musical before landing on the subject of the summer of 1816. They told me that the medium of a musical works well for the story because it offers the opportunity to pause and explore each character in some depth, as well as exploring the “abstract” ideas in their works. They also said they used the music to create a sense of the period, drawing on Mozart in the musical’s second song, ‘Lake Geneva’, and moving towards later Romantic music for the song ‘Frankenstein’. One song I found particularly interesting was about the creative process, depicted (to quote from the Lyrical Ballads preface) as an “overflow”—if not always a “spontaneous” one—as the writers try to “feel the rush” and “let it out” whilst dealing with writer’s block (you can watch a snippet of this song on their Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOy4jYejVtO/).
Nat and Natasha told me they used Polidori’s diary as their main source (supplemented by Claire Clairmont’s letters, poetry by Percy Shelley and Byron, the 1831 introduction to Frankenstein, and academic writing), and the show has Polidori introduce scenes as diary entries a couple of times. Although the show spent time exploring each of its five characters (Mary Godwin—who goes by Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Clairmont, Byron, and Polidori), Polidori certainly receives a great deal of focus, opening and closing the show, addressing the audience, and appearing in the centre of the posters. Nat and Natasha told me they did this, alongside focussing more on Claire Clairmont than depictions of this summer tend to, because they wanted a “chance to bring some justice and respect to his legacy”. Both Clairmont and Polidori are presented in the show as mistreated and ignored by their companions, and the revelation of Clairmont’s pregnancy acts as the moment when things really collapse in the villa. Despite their range of sources, they waited to watch any films about the summer of 1816 until after writing the script.
The show contained plenty of historically informed jokes, including about Percy Shelley accidentally swallowing arsenic (1) (https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOHMwpyDfeh/) and about “Darwin’s noodles”, a reference to Erasmus Darwin’s “vermicelli” (vorticella) experiment described in the 1831 Frankenstein introduction (and joked about in Young Frankenstein). I asked Nat and Natasha about their use of comedy, and they emphasised their aims of humanising these literary figures, who were ultimately “young adults”—and are played here by student actors from Cambridge University—who are bound to “have moments of teenage drama”. The first half of the show is much more light-hearted than the second—the writers said they wanted to use the comic first half to introduce their characters and ease the audience into the show before it gets darker in the second half.
This is the second Romanticism-inspired musical I’ve seen this summer, having watched Frankenstein: The Musical at Edge Hill University in August (watch our TikTok about that here: https://www.tiktok.com/@bars_romanticism/video/7547346568932789526?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7492906737819059734), and it’s been excellent to see such exciting new creative work about these writers, particularly from undergraduates, who have been heavily involved in both of these productions.
Chloe Wilcox
(1) According to Thomas Jefferson Hogg, “he used to speak with horror of the consequences of having inadvertently swallowed, through a similar accident, some mineral poison—I think arsenic—at Eton, which he declared had not only seriously injured his health, but that he feared he should never entirely recover from the shock it had inflicted on his constitution.” Hogg, Shelley at Oxford (London: Methuen, 1904), p. 38.