{"id":6178,"date":"2025-10-10T16:16:49","date_gmt":"2025-10-10T16:16:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=6178"},"modified":"2025-10-10T16:17:37","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T16:17:37","slug":"romanticism-now-1816-the-year-without-a-summer-a-new-student-musical","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=6178","title":{"rendered":"Romanticism Now: 1816: The Year Without a Summer, a new student musical"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The \u2018Romanticism Now\u2019 series on the BARS Blog discusses where Romanticism pops up in contemporary culture. In this instalment, Chloe Wilcox (BARS Communications Fellow) looks at <\/em>1816: The Year Without a Summer. If you would like to write for \u2018Romanticism Now\u2019 or any other of our blog series, please send us an email at <\/em>britishassociationromantic@gmail.com<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati has spawned a number of biopics and fictionalisations. Gothic <\/em>was released in 1986 and Mary Shelley <\/em>in 2017. One of Hugh Grant\u2019s earliest film appearances was as Lord Byron in Rowing with the Wind <\/em>(1988), and the same year saw Alex Winter play John William Polidori in Haunted Summer. <\/em>A recent addition to this tradition is 1816: The Year Without a Summer<\/em>, 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<\/sup>-7th<\/sup> August 2025), they have moved to the Lion & Unicorn Theatre in Kentish Town (30th<\/sup> September-4th<\/sup> October) and will soon be performing at Cambridge\u2019s ADC Theatre (15th<\/sup>-18th<\/sup> October). A few hours before seeing the show myself on 30th<\/sup> September, I met up with the writers, Nat and Natasha, in a caf\u00e9 to chat about it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cabstract\u201d ideas in their works.  They also said they used the music to create a sense of the period, drawing on Mozart in the musical\u2019s second song, \u2018Lake Geneva\u2019, and moving towards later Romantic music for the song \u2018Frankenstein\u2019. One song I found particularly interesting was about the creative process, depicted (to quote from the Lyrical Ballads <\/em>preface) as an \u201coverflow\u201d\u2014if not always a \u201cspontaneous\u201d one\u2014as the writers try to \u201cfeel the rush\u201d and \u201clet it out\u201d whilst dealing with writer\u2019s block (you can watch a snippet of this song on their Instagram: https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/reel\/DOy4jYejVtO\/<\/a>). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nat and Natasha told me they used Polidori\u2019s diary as their main source (supplemented by Claire Clairmont\u2019s letters, poetry by Percy Shelley and Byron, the 1831 introduction to Frankenstein<\/em>, 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\u2014who 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 \u201cchance to bring some justice and respect to his legacy\u201d. Both Clairmont and Polidori are presented in the show as mistreated and ignored by their companions, and the revelation of Clairmont\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The show contained plenty of historically informed jokes, including about Percy Shelley accidentally swallowing arsenic (1) (https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/reel\/DOHMwpyDfeh\/<\/a>) and about \u201cDarwin\u2019s noodles\u201d, a reference to Erasmus Darwin\u2019s \u201cvermicelli\u201d (vorticella) experiment described in the 1831 Frankenstein <\/em>introduction (and joked about in Young Frankenstein<\/em>). I asked Nat and Natasha about their use of comedy, and they emphasised their aims of humanising these literary figures, who were ultimately \u201cyoung adults\u201d\u2014and are played here by student actors from Cambridge University\u2014who are bound to \u201chave moments of teenage drama\u201d. The first half of the show is much more light-hearted than the second\u2014the 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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the second Romanticism-inspired musical I\u2019ve seen this summer, having watched Frankenstein: The Musical <\/em>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<\/a>), and it\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chloe Wilcox<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

(1) \u00a0According to Thomas Jefferson Hogg, \u201che used to speak with horror of the consequences of having inadvertently swallowed, through a similar accident, some mineral poison\u2014I think arsenic\u2014at 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.\u201d Hogg, Shelley at Oxford <\/em>(London: Methuen, 1904), p. 38.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The \u2018Romanticism Now\u2019 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… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6178"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6178"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6178\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6181,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6178\/revisions\/6181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}