It’s January 1803. At London’s Royal College of Surgeons, a crowd gathers around the body of George Forster, a convicted murderer freshly hanged at Newgate Prison. Surgeons, physicians, aristocrats, and curious spectators pack the theatre, eager to witness an experiment that promises to challenge the boundary between life and death.
The man at the centre of it all is the Italian natural philosopher Giovanni Aldini. Using a battery and metal conductors, Aldini passed electrical currents through George Forster’s freshly executed body. Witnesses reported that the corpse’s jaw trembled, one eye opened, and its limbs convulsed, creating the illusion of life. What happens next will echo through science and literature for the next two centuries, igniting fierce debates about the boundary between life and death, and, years later, leave its unmistakable imprint on one of the most enduring horror stories ever written: Frankenstein.
The experiments that electrified London
Galvanism, as it came to be known, had London universities, and the public gripped. In the early 1800s, there was no hotter spectacle in the city than Humphry Davy’s lectures on galvanism at London Royal Institution — so popular that the carriage jams outside led to the introduction of London’s first one-way street — Albemarle Street in Mayfair.
Among those exposed to these ideas was Mary Shelley. Growing up in London, she attended lectures like these with her father which were reshaping society’s understanding of life, death, and human ambition. When she came to write Frankenstein in 1816, these questions were never far from her mind. Reflecting on the novel’s origins years later, she wrote:
“Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated. Galvanism had given token of such things.”
But Frankenstein leaves one crucial question unresolved: if a creator unleashes something dangerous into the world, who bears responsibility for the consequences?
Now, audiences get the chance to decide
At Greenwood Theatre in Southwark, ‘Frankenstein on Trial’ puts Shelley’s scientist in the dock. As part of The Jury Experience, you’re sworn in as a juror, hear witness testimony, examine evidence, and decide whether Victor Frankenstein should be held responsible for the crimes committed by his creation.
The immersive courtroom drama revisits one of literature’s most famous moral dilemmas while introducing new evidence that casts Victor in a different light. The stakes have risen, too. A guilty verdict could result in Neurological Dissolution Therapy (NDT), a chilling punishment that would erase Victor’s intellect, memories, and identity altogether. Conviction no longer means prison — it means the possible annihilation of a human mind. Suddenly, the question of Victor’s guilt becomes far less straightforward than it first appears.
More than 200 years after London became captivated by the possibility of bringing the dead back to life, ‘Frankenstein on Trial’ asks an equally unsettling question: when a creation causes harm, is the monster guilty — or the person who made it?
The Jury Experience – Frankenstein on Trial: The Man Who Defied God
24 July 2026 18:00
