Dracula
★★☆☆☆ Atmospheric
Pavilion Theatre Glasgow: Tue 6 – Wed 7 May 2025
Review by Rebecca Mahar
Blackeyed Theatre’s Dracula is an atmospheric adaptation of Bram Stoker’s seminal Gothic novel, with more ambitions than successes.
An epistolatory novel, Dracula is challenging to adapt, notwithstanding the generalized knowledge that an audience tends to already have of the story. Written and directed by Nick Lane, this version somehow manages to fall prey both to over-reliance on this pre-existing knowledge, and to the assumption that the audience will read the six-part, several thousand word synopsis of the play in the £4 programme before the show begins.
Richard Keightley, Marie Osman, Pelé Kelland-Beau and Harry Rundle. Pic: Karl Andre Smit.
Rather than focussing on selected strands of Stoker’s novel to create a cohesive and compelling play, Lane has attempted to include everything. The result is a highlight reel of abridgement, lacking in connective tissue, pace, urgency and interest, despite excellent performances from the company.
The play begins with a shared monologue from the ensemble cast of six on how “there are such beings as vampires”, listing the characteristics that define these creatures, before they announce “Act One” and break away to take up their initial roles.
Throughout the production, the ensemble inhabit the many characters of Dracula’s world, and also act as a multiplicitous narrator, either sharing lines of letters and diary entries being written aloud, or coming together as at the beginning to exhort the audience about the nature of vampires.
wholly unsuccessful
This attempt at creating a Gothic Greek Chorus is wholly unsuccessful. It is not sufficiently fleshed out to serve as an effective framing device about vampires being omnipresent, despite the killing of Dracula. Moreover, the intrusions of random members of the ensemble into the narration (of, for example, Mina’s letters from Jonathan), add nothing to the play.
Pelé Kelland-Beau, Richard Keightley, Maya-Nika Bewley, Harry Rundle, Marie Osman and David Chafer. Pic: Karl Andre Smit.
Design and technical elements are flawed as well. The decision to have the actors perform unamplified is bold on a touring production that will be confronted with many different types of venues. For the most part, the performers rise to the challenges presented by the Pavilion Theatre, but are occasionally drowned out by sounds effects and musical underscores. Some voices become inaudible when speaking anywhere but directly downstage.
Lighting design from Oliver Welsh is beautifully atmospheric, in general, but suffers from severe flaws. Welsh has clearly not accounted for the variation of skin tone in the show’s actors: performers with deeper skin tones are lit in a regretfully dismal fashion, near-universally made ashen by poor colour choice, inadequately illuminated and pushed into the background, or both. There is no excuse for this type of incompetence from a lighting designer of Welsh’s experience.
highlights
However, there are some highlights: Marie Osmon as Lucy Westenra and Renfield delivers a haunting performance; the “Chapter 2” sequence aboard the Demeter is a fantastically put together segment; Victoria Spearing’s set, though woefully underutilised, is a feast of angles and details. The company are as a whole a seamless ensemble, shifting through their different roles with ease and skill, and exceptional movement work, directed by Enric Ortuño.
Marie Osman. Pic: Karl Andre Smit.
In the in auditorium and foyer after the play, and on the train afterwards, voices of audience members were consistently working to puzzle out what had happened during the play, who was playing what characters, and when certain events had taken place.
Overlapping timelines, actors playing multiple characters without sufficient visual differentiation, multiple Draculas without the fact of his de-aging being made clear, and fragmented framing all contribute to this ambitious adaptation falling far short of its potential.
Running time: Two hours and 20 minutes (including one interval).
Pavilion Theatre, 121 Renfield St., Glasgow G2 3AX
Tue 6 – Weds 7 May 2025.
Evenings: 7:30pm.
Run ended.
Blackeyed Theatre website: https://blackeyedtheatre.co.uk
ENDS
