Dracula
(Sound design by Chris Samuels)
How apt that the Glasgow leg of the Mark Bruce Company UK tour of their version of Dracula should fall on Halloween. Yet Dracula, at least, Bram Stoker's version, to which this most definitely refers, really has very little to do with Halloween. All Soul's Eve, the time when the veil between life and death is at its thinnest, is about communication between the two, and about the acceptance of death as a necessity and counterpart to life. Vampires, in their original literary form, are anything but that. The trend nowadays is to view the vampirism as a disease, one that produces a radically altered state in the infected party, but does not fundamentally change the person he or she was before "contracting" it. That's not what Stoker or any of his predecessors understood about it; the older vampires are considered profoundly unnatural, a literal abomination, something that disturbs the natural balance of life and death, and who bear little trace of the human they may have once been before being turned.
Choreographer and director Mark Bruce has stuck very close to Stoker's novel in this inspired translation of Dracula for dance-theatre. He has made some adjustments - impossible not to, for the novel is a strange and rambling thing, despite the enduring power of its imagery - so, for example, both Renfield and van Helsing are cut completely, while Lucy's three suitors no longer have names, merely functional titles. However, most of the pivotal scenes of the book are immediately identifiable to anyone who has read it, and to those who only know the gist, the story remains clearly enough told that it should pose no problems.
An evocatively minimalist decor - wrought iron gates at the rear of the stage, and three mobile sarcophagi which can also serve as other pieces of furniture - is highlighted by smoky beams of light, and the whole becomes a study in greys, blacks and silver, with only the dresses of Mina and Lucy standing out in primary colours. The choreography is set to an eclectic mix of music, ranging from Scarlatti to Schnittke, as well as contributions by Bruce himself, and with some forays into Victorian music-hall, electro-acoustics, and appropriately atmospheric sound effects.
The work is noticeably structured in a succession of set pieces - an introductory solo for Dracula, a pas de deux for Mina and Jonathan, the same for Lucy and her fiancé, and so on - in between narrative scenes which are more acted than danced. The pacing works well, on the whole, although there is a lot more story delivered in Act 1 than in Act 2, and I found Act 2 the stronger part. The problem with Act 1 is that Bruce has tried to pack in an enormous amount of information, maybe too much, and the result can be a little uneven.
For example, Bruce sets Jonathan's carriage ride from the crossroads to the castle, which is accompanied by a pack of wolves, to Jonathan's great consternation. This begins very well, with three dancers in very striking horse-head masks, for all the world like knights on a chess-board, and another five in stylised wolf masks cavorting alongside. However, the scene goes on too long. I still don't quite understand the grim vaudeville number the Count and his three "brides" launch into just before he departs for England. And what is one of the climactic passages of the novel, the voyage of the Demeter and its ghastly arrival as a ghost ship in Whitby, is set so sketchily it might as well have been altogether omitted.
Act 2, on the other hand, begins with Lucy Westenra's deaths, first as a human, then as a vampire, in a real showstopper of a sequence, admirably delivered by Kristin McGuire. Her Lucy in the first act overacts like a silent movie starlet; it's deliberate, her whole courtship is played for laughs, but it leaves you unprepared for the force of her interaction with Dracula and its consequences. The rest of the act follows suit, from strong point to strong point until the sudden denouement. Eleanor Duval is a suitably grave, reserved Mina, vulnerable yet determined, while Wayne Parsons is a stolid Jonathan. It's only in the depiction of their wedding night that we get to see just how perturbed both Jonathan and Mina are by Dracula's influence on their lives.
In the Stoker novel, Dracula himself is a shadowy creature (no pun intended); we see very little of him, all told. That won't work in any kind of theatrical adaptation, the creature must take centre stage, and he does so very successfully in the person of Jonathan Goddard. His gaunt, elegant figure is both world-weary and darkly energetic, charismatic and eerie, alternately suave and animalistic. He moves with exactly the sort of otherworldly grace you might expect from Dracula, an uncannily silent figure save when noise is required of him. He put the seal on a generally impressive performance.
[Next : 1st November]
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