One of the children in the audience suddenly screams straight out | Youth culture

REVIEW. Several cling to each other in the rows of benches on the Dramaten’s stage, the Lion’s Ball. A child suddenly screams out loud. But they do not admonish the actors as child audiences instinctively do: Don’t go there!! Beware!! No, it’s best to lie low when a child-eating monster (Elle Kari Bergenrud) steps across the stage on high legs.

“Franka’s monster” is a shudder with jump scares which, in the deepest sense, is about a sad and abandoned child who armors himself with anger. Melinda Kinnaman plays this stiff-necked house sitter in Mozart clothes who, during an hour of the play, revolts against his role as a child, tears up his dolls and throws them into a grave, where even his only friend falls down and crackles crackled turns into Franka’s monster. Frank’s new and highly unreliable friend.

There’s just something wrong with the play’s title, “Franka’s monster”. This version of Doctor Frankenstein is a child and his name is Frank, he calls his monster Franka, and then the title of the play should be “Frank’s monster”. Well. The kids probably don’t care about that in front of the cartoonist Emelie Södergren’s free version of the classic.

The actors are great, the sometimes funny and sometimes completely derailed Elle Karin Bergenrud’s monster, Tanja Lorentzons doll flower and Melinda Kinnaman’s grumpy, increasingly resigned Frank. The children’s ability to empathize is a sure measure of the quality of the acting and sometimes it is actually quite convincing on stage. A child covers his ears almost all the time. It’s pretty scary when the kids Todd and Bob and whatever the kids are called (all played by Tanja Lorentzon) get eaten by Franka’s bloodthirsty monster.

The play develops into a child-eater hunt, which is a shame when there are so many other angles to explore on the theme of loneliness and grief. Sofia Rombergs scenography and costuming is a teeming theater party in itself. Lots to look at for someone with an earful. However, I think that many of the children appreciate that director Carl Johan Carlson let the story degenerate into a horror.

“My God, my God, why did you exaggerate me”, finally shouts Melinda Kinnaman’s exhausted Frank, who has been beaten so much to take care of himself, refuse school, refuse normal friends, but above all to get the monster she created to stop eating children (probably a metaphor for her own aversion to ordinary social contact).

Finally he capitulates and becomes a child again in grandma’s safe arms. The monster has finally arrived at the gate. Everyone exhales.

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Gunilla Brodrej is a critic and editor on Expressen’s culture page.