The Fools That Are Left - Cait Roddam Jones Interview

In the stormy summer of 1816, Lord Byron invites famed poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, his lover Mary and her stepsister Claire to holiday with him and his physician, John Polidori. One night, Byron proposes that they each write a ghost story to pass the time. Two years later, “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley is published. This play imagines what the conversations had on that pivotal night might have sounded like…

The play is written by Cait Roddam Jones. We sat down with Cait to learn more.

What can you tell me about The Fools That Are Left and the inspiration behind the play?
The Fools That Are Left had been cooking on a simmer in my brain ever since I began studying Frankenstein at A-Level. Even though I had been a literature enthusiast all my life, there was so much I never knew about everything that went on behind the scenes to make Mary Shelley’s most famous work a reality. I remember being so excited at the prospect of Mary and Lord Byron having personally known each other, and not only that - but that they had holidayed together with Percy, John Polidori, and her stepsister Claire. I couldn’t quite believe that this was all true, and the thought of turning the story of that night into a theatrical production absolutely crossed my mind. I got my A-Levels and my first year of university out the way before sitting down to write as I wanted to be able to devote my heart and soul to it, and I’m so glad I got it finished when I did! It does feel like as good a time as any to have it out there at long last.

The Villa Diodati ghost story challenge is one of the most famous nights in literary history. What was the specific spark that made you want to zoom in on this exact evening and imagine the dialogue?
I’m always looking for something to write a play about. My ears will prick up very quickly when I read about or see something that would look good on a stage. In my own humble opinion, there are certain things that can be achieved in live theatre that cannot be on screen in the same way. I know a couple of movies have been made about this night that make a point of speculating about what might have happened, but I couldn’t help wondering “how has no one written a play about this before? It’s perfect for the stage!”. I wanted this true story to be something that audiences could get up close and personal with in a way that they might not be able to just by watching a movie about it. One of the key ideas that really bothered me was that these figures (Mary Shelley, Percy, Byron etc) all seem intangible and too big for us to grasp. That is ridiculous! Because once upon a time, these were young people going about their day, worrying about current affairs and the future of their world. Their parents had seen through the French and American revolutions (and I believe some of the residual trauma from those events was passed down to them), and they were surrounded by talk of potential revolution in their home country of England. These were very anxiety-inducing subjects for them - and I ultimately wanted to demonstrate to the audience through this zoom-in on the night and the dialogue I had written for it that when you boil them down to who they were on that night specifically - there is very little difference between them and a group of 21st century 20-year-olds sitting in the audience. I hope that comes across!

The play is a 45-minute one-act. How did you manage the constraint of time when trying to capture five incredibly complex, historically massive personalities (Byron, Percy, Mary, Claire, and Polidori)?
It all comes back to my attempts at humbling these huge, deity-like literary figures. As you’ve brilliantly articulated in your question, they are “historically massive personalities”, but I had to do away with that idea to make this piece efficient, but to also get the message across. I marked out several points of conflict in my head and wrote the dialogue around them - even after several drafts, it still only came up to 45 minutes. The characters bear their souls, love and fight each other, find a way out of their madness-inducing boredom, and then suddenly, they’ve said what they’ve needed to say! I also knew immediately that this was the kind of play that would not suit an interval. I wanted this piece to feel like a whirlwind and for the audience to leave almost a little winded after watching. I wanted it to be the kind of play where they leave thinking “I need a drink after that!”as so much happens over the course of these 45 minutes. I have a sneaking suspicion that some extremely chaotic events took place on that night, or at least at some point over the course of their stay, and I don’t think the sense of pandemonium I was so desperate to achieve would have been possible if I had written any more or let the audience breathe with an interval. The point of the play is not to aimlessly construct an imagining of the whole night or the whole stay at the Villa Diodati - all I wanted to do was to offer my interpretation of the conversations had in the lead-up to Byron finally proposing that ghost story competition - turns out, 45 minutes was all I needed to do that!

We all know the outcome of that night (the birth of Frankenstein and Polidori's The Vampyre), but your play focuses on the conversations leading up to it. How much of your script relies on historical record versus pure creative intuition?
I conducted some quite extensive research in the lead-up to writing and producing this piece, and one of the most fascinating discoveries I made was that there is not in fact a great deal to go on! Mary Shelley mentions very little about the specificities of the night within her diaries and letters. We know that Byron read Christabel by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and that they stayed up almost the entire night –there really isn’t much more to it than that. This revelation was simultaneously exciting and absolutely terrifying – because I could pretty much write anything I wanted to, but there was almost no narrative guidance available from a historiographical perspective. I’ll be the first to admit that there are tiny details within the play that are romanticised - perhaps it’s me imagining what I would have liked to have happened rather than what did happen. But I like to believe I have been as faithful as I can to these young people. A couple of lines in the play have been taken from Mary’s diary and Frankenstein itself - so hopefully that will be a nice Easter egg for the audience members who will recognise that! I had to remember that I cannot write these people exactly as they were - no one will ever know what these people were like to be in a room with. I have to remind myself and my cast that they are still characters; I am not attempting to write the ‘absolute’ version that coincides completely and utterly with who they might have been in real life - that would be presumptuous and ultimately impossible. The whole play is a little piece of speculation. I’m an unreliable narrator!

You’ve previously written about the exploitation and sexualisation of young women in media. When looking at Mary Shelley (who was only 18 at the time) and Claire Clairmont, did you find parallels between their historical reality and the modern critiques you explore in your work?
I feel very strongly about Mary and Claire’s predicaments in this stage of their lives, and how they are presented in the stories of the ‘great’ men surrounding them. I absolutely see parallels between their own stories and those I continue to hear today concerning vile mistreatment and abuse of women in domestic settings. By the summer of 1816, a seventeen-year-old Claire had fallen pregnant with Byron’s child, and Mary had already lost her first baby. Byron refused to care for his and Claire’s child (later enduring crippling guilt about this after the infant died), and Percy invariably becomes emotionally absent whenever Mary suffers a miscarriage or the loss of another baby – she had five recorded pregnancies and only one child lived to see adulthood. I read and hear about these predicaments in our world all the time. Having those tragic female experiences without any modicum of support is so ubiquitous even now. Something I get very offended by is this widely accepted idea that Mary and Percy are the ultimate what Gen Z would call ‘couple goals’ - the absolute example of love and dedication within a marriage. It wasn’t like that in real life - they became very distant in the years leading up to Percy’s death, and he had almost definitely been unfaithful. They loved each other, but it was far from perfect. As for Claire and Byron, that’s a whole different situation to tackle. The domestic disenfranchisement of these women in their relationships with these ‘great man’ was frustrating to write, and I have no doubt that I have given them much more of a voice than they would have had in the real room. I had to try not to get too angry about this, otherwise my own voice would have become too involved in the dialogue; I’m trying to leave it out as much as possible in this piece. But when you are attempting to write the voices of women who have raised and lost children on their own at such a young age, it is very difficult to not write angrily about it - and that’s okay with me.

The title, The Fools That Are Left, is incredibly evocative. Who are "the fools" in the context of this room, and what does that title say about how these legendary figures viewed themselves—or how history views them?
Thank you! This question conceptualises a huge part of the conversation engaged with in the play. There is a fantastic quote in Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’ when a court jester asserts that “the wise man knows himself to be a fool”. I fell in love with that statement the first time I heard it - because it is just so pertinent! All these characters are ‘fools’ in their own way. There are certain people in the room who know they are a ‘fool’ and will behave like one, but their pride makes it impossible for them to admit it. There are others who are ‘fools’ and don’t even know it. And then you have a couple of people who are completely aware of their own ‘foolishness’ and are happy to accept and acknowledge it. There is a lot of discourse about legacy in this piece, and the writers’ anxieties surrounding their own legacy - their obsession with being remembered makes them foolish. The title The Fools That Are Left conceptualises both their ultimate fear (being forgotten) and their ultimate achievement (being remembered). I am not calling these brilliant writers ‘fools’ because I don’t respect or care for them - it is to humanise them. These were young and bold people who were simultaneously brilliant and stupid in their own ways. Once I understood that completely, they became much easier to write.

You have a rich background as a musician and an actor-musician with Shakespeare’s Globe. How does your musicality influence the rhythm and cadence of the dialogue in this play? Did you approach the writing with a specific "sonic landscape" in mind for that stormy night?
Music is integral to every project I undertake - and this play is no exception. I wanted the sound of thunder and lightning to behave as a form of music in this show. It underscores the tone, the pace, and the rhythm of the text - it almost behaves as the final character. I like the idea of the thunder itself listening into the conversations being had - after all - it is (in the play) what plants the idea of a ghost story competition in Byron’s head. The only time we hear music in the show is right at the end when the characters are leaving the villa for good – and that is when no one is speaking. I have always used music in theatre to mark a shift in events or tone, and this music we hear at the end should behave as the final snap back into reality: they are going home and this chapter of their lives has ended. Mary goes home and writes Frankenstein, Polidori writes The Vampyre, and everything changes. I won’t give away too much about the specificities of the show, but each time we hear a clap of thunder or a piece of music, it communicates to the audience that something is about to shift or conclude. I would love to one day write a play where music is featured all throughout - Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (one of my favourite films) is a notable example of a piece that uses numerous original songs to mark a shift in the story without it crossing over into a musical. That will be something to think about for the next project!

As a published poet, how did your poetic background influence how you voiced Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron? Was it intimidating to write dialogue for two of the most celebrated poets in the English language?
I cannot relate to Shelley or Byron as poets whatsoever. We all love nature and are obsessed with the supernatural, and that’s where the similarities end. I have never attempted to write like these poets (except for one time when I tried to write like Keats - a gross stretch of my talents), and have never really wished to do so. However, I do love their poetry, and it must have influenced me somehow - you cannot deny that a lot of their works are truly brilliant. But funnily enough, I didn’t find writing their voices to be an intimidating process. I had to separate them as people from the huge literary figures we perceive them to be now. In this play, the audience are not watching literary figures, they are watching two 20-something-year-old men perform intellectual curiosity to each other - engaging in constant and exhausting one-up-man-ship. I found Mary to be far more intimidating than any of the men - probably because I have read much more of her own voice - but as I’ve mentioned previously, I had to remember that I’m not trying to write the real Mary Shelley, but one creative version of her which attempts to balance authentic testimony with a respectable degree of theatrical romanticisation. That way of thinking takes a lot of the pressure off.

You debuted your first one-woman play at just seventeen. How did your early experience navigating the fringe festival circuit shape how you produced and brought The Fools That Are Left to life?
I proved a lot to myself while working on that show. It was the first time that my work had been shown to a paying, public audience - and I had done all of it myself. It was me, myself, and I - and I cannot tell you how much that strengthened my faith in my own work. I will always be extremely grateful to the teams at the Camden Fringe and the Camden People’s Theatre for giving me a chance and supporting me throughout that process. I still struggle so much with anxiety and imposter syndrome in the context of my work, but producing that piece helped a great deal. There has been a three-year-break between my first play and Fools, and so much has happened in that time that has prepared me perfectly for this next project. Between then and now, I got my A-Levels, started university, got my Equity card and undertook some more professional theatre work, where I had lots of opportunity to intently observe the methods of the brilliant directors and producers that I got to collaborate with. I don’t write seriously when I’m not inspired, and those three years behaved as an interim period for me to generate all the ideas I needed for Fools. I grew in confidence and developed the experience I needed to finally direct my first ensemble cast. That would never have been possible if I hadn’t jumped into the deep end with my solo show - I couldn’t be more excited!

John Polidori is often overshadowed by Byron and the Shelleys, yet his contribution to gothic literature that summer was monumental. How does your play navigate the specific tension between Polidori and the rest of the group?
Thank you for mentioning Polidori! His contribution to the Gothic genre cannot be understated, and it is criminal that his name is barely mentioned in the discourse surrounding vampires in contemporary pop culture. If we hadn’t had Polidori, we would not have had Dracula. I read The Vampyre last year and was throughly impressed - it is a mature and poignant piece of work for all its grotesqueness and horror, and I was particularly struck by the context of Lord Byron having allegedly been the inspiration for Polidori’s vampire character. It is no surprise to me that Byron is the closest someone could come to the status of vampire without the fangs and blood-sucking. Polidori was clearly a man who harboured high emotional intelligence, which is very much to his credit, but it also explains why he was never long for the dreadful world he lived in. Byron spends a lot of time bullying and belittling Polidori in this play, because he is the anti-Byron. From what I have read, he comes across as a more shy, introspective figure with extraordinary but quiet intelligence. The intelligence of most of the other characters is loud and performative - hence why he bonds with Mary (whose intelligence is effortless and immediate) and clashes with everyone else.

Isolation and claustrophobia are huge elements of that summer due to the "Year Without a Summer" weather. How does the raging storm outside act as a catalyst for the internal storms and psychological drama inside the room?
First and foremost, these anxious, drunk and jittery young individuals are all bored out of their wits at this point in time. Percy and Byron might have been looking forward to a holiday of riding, swimming or hiking - and what they were met with instead was a stylistically heightened form of self-isolation. In my head, these characters have already been in each other’s company for about a week, and are getting to their end’s tether with one another. I really appreciate you mentioning the themes of isolation and claustrophobia together - these are such prevalent elements in terms of what drives the narrative. I won’t give too much away, but there is one moment where it looks like everything could explode and get irreparably out of hand. Does it? I won’t say - but it does get heated. These characters might feel immense infatuation for one another one minute, and have that feeling replaced with explosive laudanum-induced hatred the next. We’ll see if they end up working things out…

What was the first piece of theatre you remember having a big impact on you?
I remember my first experience of “the theatre” very well. My parents took my sister and I to see a Shakespeare in the Park-adjacent production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream two days before my ninth birthday. I’d seen pantos and ballets before and had absolutely loved them, but this was the first time I remember experiencing true captivation at a performance. There were about six actors playing all the parts. I remember the actor playing the roles of Helena, Titania and Hippolyta - how ethereal she was and also how believable! I’d never seen a performance that handled the supernatural in a such a human way, and I think that’s what drew me to MSND and perhaps later the Gothic genre! A Midsummer Night’s Dream is still my favourite play, and one of my career goals is to direct it. It goes to show, doesn’t it? A tiny production of an ostensibly out-of-reach Shakespeare play had this tremendous impact on me before I was even nine years old. Moral of the story: take your kids to the theatre! It will do them so much good. Even if it doesn’t point them in the direction of a career in the theatre, it will expand and feed their imaginations so much. Now more than ever, we need strong imaginations in the world!

What inspires you the most in life?
Young people and children. I work with young children and teens as an English tutor, and there is nothing more inspiring than watching the cogs in their brains moving when I ask them, “what do you think?” Or “how do you feel about this interpretation of the text?”. We talk about so much more than English in our lessons. English is always adjacent to other societally immediate subjects such as history, politics and psychology, and I love helping them develop their ability to say what they think once they have the evidence to back it up - sometimes they even challenge the things I say, and that is truly an incredible thing! I wholeheartedly believe in the idea that young people are the hope for an increasingly daunting and uncertain future. I’m not saying that to put pressure on the younger generation - as a Gen Z I feel that on the day to day myself. I say it because I have seen the intellect and emotional intelligence these young people harbour already - many of them will go on to do great things and sort out some of the mess in the world! It’ll be a team effort, but it will happen.

What do you hope audiences take away from this play? Do you want them to see these figures as the untouchable literary icons they became, or do you want to strip that away to show them simply as flawed, brilliant teenagers and twenty-somethings trapped in a room together?
The main idea I would like audiences to take away is that there is in fact very little difference between the young writers we see in the play at this point in their lives, and the young writers of today. I’m not trying to dictate to the audience how I think they should perceive these characters - I’m merely offering one more interpretation to the mix. They shouldn’t feel that they have to take my word for this story - ultimately - I know no more than they do. I want them to have fun, I want them to think, I want them to laugh and perhaps cry a little bit, and then go to the bar afterwards and just talk about it. I want them to talk about these people and become invested in them if they were not already before. I just wrote this little piece to make people think and talk - if I see them doing that in the pub after the show, then I know I’ve done my job!

The Fools That Are Left runs at Etcetera Theatre in London on Monday 27th and Tuesday 28th July 2026. For tickets and more information visit https://www.etceteratheatrecamden.com/events/the-fools-that-are-left