Details
Location: The Electric Theatre, Guildford
Dates: 15th November - 17th November, 7.45 pm
Tickets: £15 www.electric.theatre
Our Verdict
It was a brave, but perhaps unwise choice by director Michael Thonger to stage Liz Lochhead’s play “Dracula” at the Electric Theatre this week. Lochhead is a poet, who clearly has little idea of the demands of writing for live theatre as compared with radio drama or the cinema. Without a revolving stage or, at the very least, an available complex system of backdrops and trapdoors, this dramatisation for the stage of the classic story of vampires, sex and death suffered from a plethora of interruptions, in the form of furniture being trundled on and removed at roughly ten-minute intervals. However quickly and efficiently this is carried out, it becomes tedious and distracting.
Suspension of disbelief for the audience is an essential element of narrative theatre, I suggest, and in this production, that condition is lacking. The story is so well known as to be a series of tropes; Lochhead has made gestures towards irony and has emphasised a modern agenda, political and feminist, which is embedded in the original text by Bram Stoker.
There are polemical speeches from the male characters on fin-de-siècle anxiety, about the pace of change and the rise of female emancipation. There are complaints about social and sexual inhibition by the females. There is little wit or lightness of touch in the script to enable the audience to engage with the play's messages and the slow pace of the prop-heavy production doesn’t help.
In this version of Stoker’s tale, Renfield, the lunatic in Doctor Seward’s clinic, is female and acts as a kind of chorus. Into her mouth, I suspect Lochhead has placed poetry of a feminist nature (There is a clue when Renfield is forced into a straightjacket in parallel on the stage with Mina’s fitting for her wedding dress before she is to marry Jonathan. The words were hard to hear but the ranting tones in which Malin Karp delivered them were highly effective. Mina (Debby Dean) was clear-spoken and believable.
Some of the special effects do work: the appearance of ghostly houris from the sheets of an innocent-looking bed was a chilling surprise early on. The pace improved in the second half when Van Helsing (Kim Ferguson with an accent which made some speeches hard to hear) held the story together and moved it along. Count Dracula (Phill Griffith) was satisfyingly grotesque and sinister – a classic example of the kind of lover a self-destructive girl might find irresistible, which I took to be one of the underlying themes of the fable. Gavin Brennan played Jonathan Harker well, as the ordinary Victorian Englishman caught up in a nasty situation among foreigners abroad. There were some excellent vignettes by Gilly Flick, Pam Hemeryk and Amy Vorston as nurses and servants.
This is not the best Guildburys' production I have seen (they have staged a series of excellent shows this year). The set deserves a mention, being imaginatively based on German Expressionism's chaotic geometry, but unfortunately, this sophisticated concept was matched neither by the production as a whole nor by the content of the play.
