REVIEW: 1816: The Year Without a Summer at Lion & Unicorn Theatre, 30 Sept – 4 Oct 2025

'Formulaic but fancy musical with a killer hook and rich set of characters' ★★★★

Two hundred years ago, a group of friends unwittingly changed the face of horror and science fiction forever. In Lord Byron’s rented villa in Lake Geneva, during the freak summerless year of 1816, he was joined by his personal physician, John Polidori, his friends Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley, and former lover Claire Clairmont. Over a rainy few days, holed up in the villa, Byron proposed a ghost story competition, from which came the legendary Frankenstein and the first modern vampire.

1816: The Year Without A Summer is a new musical by Nat Riches and Natasha Atkinson that dramatises this most famous of holidays. It takes the fertile context, unpacks it, explores the human dramas and interactions of these people, and adds songs. And, while not perfect, it does it incredibly well.

Billing itself as “Friends meets Frankenstein”, we start with the snappily characterised cast, which does give it that sitcom feel...or at least a nineteenth century Spice Girls: there's the physician, John Polidori (Francesca Horgan), providing some sparse comic relief, a strangely bumbling buffoon of a sidekick to Lord Byron (Oliver Kingston); then there's the good lord himself (they've done him dirty here), vacuous and mean, but brilliantly campy and seductive; we get Claire Clairmont (Kaitlin Pryce), wistful and dreamy, an innocent Jane Austen-type deeply in love with Lord Byron; Percy Bysshe Shelley (Joe Davies), political and tortured; and then arguably the most interesting of all, but least explored and most underdeveloped, Mary Shelley (Natasha Atkinson), serious and quietly brilliant.

You know instantly that this is a highly polished, exceptionally professional, and incredibly well produced musical. You’ll find out that it has very little plot, but a lot of unshowy intelligence.

The first stumbling block is that there's a bit of a problem with perspective, which comes from being an ensemble-led piece with a compact runtime. We open right off the bat with Polidori and Byron, from whose point of view our story initially begins, before performing a number of gear shifts throughout the musical to take us through the eyes of the lovesick Claire and underdog Mary. And this is where I can't help but think that the real story here is Shelley's psychological journey to Frankenstein (Percy is all but irrelevant). Her scenes are somehow the most magnetic, even if her performance is relatively weaker, and her set piece solo is by far the most memorable. With famous intellectuals for parents, her precocious youth, and the weight of family expectation, hers is a rich situation to explore.

She's kind and a bit nondescript, and nobody expects that this will be the birthplace of her genius masterwork, Frankenstein. I found it interesting to think of these other juggernauts as just supporting characters around her story – but that's not really what it is. Instead, it meanders shallowly around each of the characters as Byron challenges them to find a ghost story within themselves.

It also appears to hover around issues of feminism, which it doesn't quite get into, but suggests incidentally – the unfairly differing reputations of the men and women, the vaguely dismissive attitude towards Clairmont and Shelley. The more I think about it, the more I think this was done deftly and cleverly, without unnecessary preachiness or cries for relevance.

Be prepared for the fact that it's not really a comedy though (don't get me wrong, I think that’s to its credit, and to my personal delight) – there are lighter moments, for sure, and one or two very funny lines (Lord Byron, desperate for Gothic inspiration, toys with a vampire story about two characters called Bella and Edward...), but beyond that this is actually a far more sober and atmospheric piece than its marketing would suggest. This musical is just as good for a bookish and tongue-in-cheek approach to the spooky season as anything. Tonally, think more towards the 1990 Jekyll & Hyde end (or at least it should be) than Six by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss.

Overall, 1816 is a formulaic but fancy musical with a killer hook and rich set of characters. Some of the vocals are stronger than others, but the performances are professional to a fault. Bringing it to life is a live piano trio on stage, led by Rich Mandal, the musicians of which all play wonderfully.

The music itself is conventional, satisfying, and very skilled, if not particularly memorable, and the same can be said of the lyrics. There isn't an ounce of cringe anywhere. You're in very, very safe hands with this production.

The music and story are then supplemented by incredible lighting from Beatrice Heslop. The classily sparing use of vivid greens invoking Shelley's iconic monster and richly garish reds reminiscent of Polidori's groundbreaking Vampyre is simultaneously fun and haunting – particularly for that Shelley solo I mentioned earlier, which is also complemented by some excellent movement from the cast.

Yvonne Gao’s costumes, too, are also worth a shout-out, as they're brilliantly evocative and impressively detailed.

To finish, it returns often to some motif that Byron was the dark, slightly annoying inspiration for the monsters and misery in these people’s lives. And while some of that is undoubtedly true, and though I understand he was more than likely a bit of an arse, as described in the show, as a fan I find myself a touch protective of his broader reputation, which the whiff of revisionism in this production just about respects. For the sake of narrative it makes a big deal out of Byron's apparent lack of inspiration and the misattribution of Polidori's The Vampyre to him, but we should remember that both Polidori AND Byron correctly attributed authorship to the physician, and that Byron himself wrote the vampire story “A Fragment” during this time, early drafts of which may have been the inspiration for Polidori’s own.

But most of that simply comes down to the necessarily caricatured portraits of the characters themselves. In any case it’s accomplished theatre, far beyond what you might expect from these brilliant little theatres, and an absolute bargain night out. It doesn't try too hard, flows without a bum note, and brings these historical characters into modernity just enough not to be annoying.

For me, it's a reminder to support these venues. When you find big productions in mini spaces above or below surprising venues, it brings to mind a quote from the 6th Lord himself. In these magical theatres on street corners, when the lights go down and we all fall silent, we’re cut off from the real world and find stories together, as an audience, "in solitude, where we are least alone.”

1816: The Year Without a Summer

Written by Nat Riches & Natasha Atkinson

Directed by Gina Stock

Music Direction by Rich Mandal

Lion & Unicorn Theatre, 30 Sept – 4 Oct 2025

ADC Theatre, 15 – 18th Oct 2025

Box Office: https://1816musical.com/book/

Reviewed by Alix Owen