Nat Riches, who studies Natural Sciences at Trinity College, and Natasha Atkinson, who graduated from Downing College with a Law degree in 2024, were intrigued by the ‘haunted summer’ of 1816, when tumultuous weather confined writers including Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and Mary Godwin (later Mary Shelley) to a villa beside Lake Geneva.
1816: The Year Without A Summer is one of two Cambridge student productions selected by the Cambridge University Musical Theatre Society for the Camden and Edinburgh Fringe festivals this summer.
The musical brings to life the literary characters and Byron’s personal doctor John Polidori and his lover Claire Clairmont, who were cooped up in Villa Diodati by the terrible weather wrought by the huge volcanic eruption of 1815 in the then Dutch East Indies.
As rain lashes down, the wind gets up and it’s dark by the afternoon, Byron sets the assembled guests a challenge: write the most chilling ghost story. The challenge led to the conception of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and John Polidori’s The Vampyre, two of the greatest horror stories of the last two centuries.
1816: The Year Without A Summer premieres at the Camden Fringe Festival on August 6 and 7.
Cambridge students – one a researcher in the electrical currents of heart tissue – have created a new musical partly inspired by the genesis of Mary Shelley’s monster, which was brought to life by electricity.
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