Written and directed by Jonathan Holloway for his own theatre company, Red Shift, this is a curious reworking of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Holloway obviously has a keen appreciation of the vampire genre and the classic Nosferatu films, for this stylish production has an atmosphere of low-budget horror meets film noir, but can you take the vampire from the story, the teeth-marks from the neck, and retain the terrible foreboding?
Updating the story to a post-war London of dapper suits and trilbys, Holloway attempts to transpose the sexual tensions of the original, while giving the physician, Van Helsing, an unspeakable past. Dutch in Stoker's novel, Van Helsing is here a German haunted by Nazi atrocities, and this allows Holloway to use the blood motif as symbolic of the quest for racial purity. No need then for Count Dracula and his blood-suckers - this is Nosferatu as the spectre of German war-guilt. Richard Heap's Van Helsing is a commanding hybrid of intellectual arrogance and fevered remorse, but the Nazi undercurrent doesn't quite cohere.
Holloway's script feels as if it began as a straight adaptation of Stoker's novel and then tried to turn elsewhere. With a cast of only four, doubling-up is required; but even so, important characters in the novel - not least Mina and Jonathan Harker - are introduced far too late.
Confusingly, Harker's journal is either narrated by Van Helsing or recited by a voice-over. And in the scene where Renfield drinks Dr Seward's blood, the drama is curtailed when the doctor steps to the front of the stage to tell us what happened next.
Still, there are strong performances, particularly from Matthew Lloyd Davies, who measures every step to good effect as the timid but tenacious Jack Seward, doctor at the asylum and the foil to Van Helsing's inscrutable gravity. Keith Lancaster as the fly-eating madman Renfield, meanwhile, does not quite compare to Tom Waits's brilliantly tongue-curling performance in the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola film of Dracula. And what's more, he sounds worryingly like William Hague.
Lucy Burden has more success as Lucy Westenra, affording her a tortured girlishness with a squeaky voice and some wonderfully concerned expressions.
As befits the genre, there are elements of self-parody - how else can you get away with all that howling wind and screaming? - and the production is big on melodramatic music, dry ice, fake blood and a rotating minimalist set designed to screen every shift of shadow and light. Yet the play lacks the sensuality of the original, the self-indulgent lushness that made it both sexy and scary.
You can rest assured, though, that the Count will come again.
