Dracula: theatre review

A true-to-the-text version of the horror classic.

This clever adaptation of Bram Stoker’s classic novel was written by Nick Lane and produced by Blackeyed Theatre In association with Harrogate Theatre and South Hill Park Arts Centre. I saw it on Monday 18th November 2024 at the Devonshire Park Theatre in Eastbourne.

Six actors chopped and changed to play a dozen parts (as well as some non-speaking roles). Marie Osman was particularly effective as the wayward Lucy Westernra; perhaps this was because she was given time to develop the role. It can’t be easy to flesh out a part when you have three actors playing the title role. I found that some of my immersion in the play was diluted by having to remind myself which character this actor was playing. This, together with the singing introductions to each act created in me a sense of alienation. Furthermore, when actors recited extracts from the letters and journals and case notes of the characters, prefacing what they said by saying, for example, “from the case notes of Doctor John Seward”, this, while created the sense that we were watching a book being read aloud, rather than seeing a dramatisation. I wanted to be spell-bound. I wanted to be frightened and horrified and shocked. I understand the dangers of tipping over into risible melodrama but this production felt flat.

I doubt I was the only audience member to feel this way. No-one gasped. There was respectful silence. And a few seats that had been full before the interval were empty afterwards.

And yet this was not a poor production. The actors did a competent, professional job. The set was cleverly designed. The lighting and music and effects were all in place. There were moments when it came alive: the female vampires in the bridal dresses crawling over the stage, feasting on a kitten in a bag; the sound and sight of the bones of one character being crunched; Dracula plunging his fangs into the neck of one of the women. But there was an almost total absence of special effects. I appreciate form and staging and the concentration on character and deprecate the modern attempts by theatre to emulate the cinema with its prioritisation of spectacle over story and yet I was still disappointed.

Perhaps the problem was the decision to stay so close to the book (though it baffles me why, having been so faithful, they changed the ending). Theatre is a different medium from the novel. I suspect that if Bram Stoker, a theatre manager as well as a novelist, had adapted his book it would have been quite different.

But it did have the effect of making me want to re-read the book!