Brighton’s Lantern Theatre continue their season of innovative and interesting drama performances with a piece that had rave reviews at Tide at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2024.
They cast her as Cinderella, but she feels more like Frankenstein’s monster.
Cinderella and Frankenstein’s Monster Are Dead follows 昭兰 (Zhao Lan), a Chinese exchange student who sees herself in Frankenstein’s monster—unseen, unworthy, stitched together. Cast as Cinderella in her high school play, she hopes to finally belong. But foreign stories glitch into nightmares. Mandarin rhymes fade. She realizes: both Cinderella and the monster are dead. She’s neither.
Blurring the boundaries between the Western literary canon and marginalized identities, the new experimental one-woman performance weaves together physical theatre, song, and poetic narratives. Stories of Chinese American immigrants from different generations slowly unfold, with their identities erased, rewritten, and ultimately reclaimed.
Cinderella and Frankenstein’s Monster Are Dead’s 2025 Brighton Fringe production is written, directed, and produced by Langyue “Petunia” Hu, performed by Lan Jiang.
Performances:
May 22nd & 26th, 5:00 pm
May 23rd, 2:00 pm
May 27th, 7:00 pm
Tickets are available from Brighton Fringe priced at £12/£8.
