Deep inside an old abandoned mansion, while the world outside is lashed by thunder and lightning, five friends meet, defying the law to consider a tattered humanity’s future.

This famous 1816 gathering of literary figures Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, John Polidori, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Claire Clairmont over a weekend in Switzerland, is the basis for The Darkness, a site-responsive theatre work taking over Newtown’s 1911 School of Arts building.

Set in the near future, The Darkness also draws from an explosion in 1815 of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, which darkened skies and triggered chaotic weather patterns. For three years following the so-called “year without a summer” crops were ruined, food prices rose, disease spread and unrest rippled through society.

More than two centuries later, the world faces similar issues. The Darkness, created by stage and screenwriter Andrew Bovell, writers Zoey Dawson, Dan Giovannoni, and writer and actor Megan Wilding, tackles what five modern-day minds can surmise about our future.

Director Dino Dimitriadis says, within enormous flux and uncertainty, both gatherings trigger creative genesis and passionate debate.

“Over that weekend in 1816 they were trapped together in the Villa Diodati beside Lake Geneva during a torrential rain event,” Dimitriadis says. “They challenged each other to tell ghost stories to get through what they were facing in the world.

“It was that weekend Mary conceived Frankenstein and the seeds of the Dracula story were also planted in a story from Polidori.”

“The Darkness is not about that weekend. It’s about taking that meeting and asking what does that event look like now? Now that we’re facing questions around the future, around the state of the world, around ecological crisis.”

The show’s five characters, named after Byron, Shelley and co, are modern versions of their namesakes facing a version of our future.