Drac is back. Earlier this year, the caped bloodsucker presided over a “comedy of terrors” at the Menier Chocolate Factory. In a few months, Wicked’s Cynthia Erivo will play every role in a solo performance based on Bram Stoker’s 1897 classic. But first, writer Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, director Emma Baggott and a cast of six – often bathed in blood-red lighting – deliver a feminist retelling.
Stoker’s book comprises sections from the characters’ journals and diaries, plus letters and newspaper reports, compiled by Mina Harker in a bid to fathom and defeat Dracula. This production uses a variety of audio effects to relay those and adds its own equivalent of footnotes, commentaries and what increasingly feel like mini-essays. Repeatedly telling rather than showing, they interrupt the flow of the familiar story, which now comes with more of a narrative from Mina, whose words were marginalised by Stoker.
Mina directs or stage-manages a play within the play, the apparent conceit being that those who lived through the original events are now re-enacting them as cautionary tale and trauma therapy. There are some extra gremlins devilling their production, akin to Inside No 9: Stage/Fright, while unreliable narrators and twists abound as the script asks who is demonised in our modern age of division.
Bathed in blood red lighting … Dracula. Photograph: Marc Brenner
It’s one of those increasingly common meta productions where scenes are conjured out of thin air (much of the set is on wheels, a storage trunk becomes a coffin) only to be swiftly deconstructed and reframed. That stop-start approach not only demands prior knowledge of the novel but also drains the tension in an interval-free show that drags despite a 95-minute running time. The principal problem, though, is that it is only reasonably creepy and scarcely scarier than KPop Demon Hunters. This is partly due to some jaunty comedy but also because atmosphere (design by Grace Smart, lighting by Joshie Harriette) often comes secondary to analysis and the fixation on how to tell the story becomes a distraction.
Nevertheless, Umi Myers is commanding as Mina, although too often stuck in narrator mode, and Mei Mac is compelling as always, if underused, as her friend Lucy, whose character could be yet more expanded. It’s frustrating because there are potent issues raised about the limitations placed on women in the Victorian patriarchy, our own times and the novel itself. (On her first mention in the book, assistant schoolmistress Mina is squarely placed in the kitchen by her fiance, Jonathan, who reminds himself to get her the recipe for a dish he has enjoyed.) There is a particularly modern resonance when Mina challenges how airily men make decisions over women’s bodies, yet characters are too often flatly lampooned (the ensemble is completed by Jack Myers, Phoebe Naughton, Macy Seelochan and B Terry).
As in the bloodless vampire psychodrama Apex Predator, there are flashes of a far more gripping treatment of the core idea. These come, maddeningly, at the end of the evening. With illusions by John Bulleid and Gareth Kalyan, it’s a tricksy production but – despite all the talent involved – not much of a treat.