Crick Crack Club's Frankenstein enters world of feverish dreaming at sold-out Theatre Royal

Created and adapted by charming, playful, challenging storyteller Ben Haggarty, with music and songs composed and sung by multi-instrumentalist Sianed Jones, this 7.45pm show enters a world of feverish dreaming as Haggarty and Jones embark on an intense monster's-lib interpretation of Mary Shelley's myth.

Each major technological innovation that revolutionised human society has had an effect on the myths that support popular imagination. In Mary Shelley's case, at the age of only 19, she wrote that the story came to her in a waking dream.

This followed days of confinement in a villa on the edge of Lake Geneva during the summer of 1816, a summer plagued with bad weather caused by volcanic ash from a major eruption in Indonesia. Conversations about the experiments of natural philosopher and poet Erasmus Darwin, who was said to have animated dead matter, and an evening of telling ghost stories influenced her too.

"Truly a story for our time, Frankenstein speaks of power unleashed; the responsibility of the creator towards the created, and our fear of the unknown," says Haggarty. "Expect wild song, steam punk and fast-paced epic storytelling."

Drawing on the original story, Hollywood’s cinematic retellings, Greek and Jewish legends and pop culture, Crick Crack's startling contemporary performance combines improvised spoken word, vocals, bass and electric violin to lure audiences into the imagined world of Dr Frankenstein and the monster he created.

Crick Crack artistic director Haggarty, Honorary Professor of Storytelling at the Arts University of Berlin, will tell his stories with infectious charm and deceptive ease; musician Sianed Jones is said to possess the voice of a "wailing Welsh banshee", a "soft seducer" and a "passionate revolutionary". Working internationally, she has toured Europe, America, Russia and Mongolia and researched vocal techniques in Egypt, Kenya, Tanzania, Madagascar and Central Asia.