Now that’s what I call event theatre. Watching Cynthia Erivo in this solo rendition of Bram Stoker’s novel is akin to seeing an ice skater going for gold in the Winter Olympics. Can she pull off one triple Lutz after another without taking a tumble?
During early previews at the Noël Coward, word of mouth suggested that the Wicked star — who plays all 23 characters, some live, some pre-recorded — was struggling to negotiate the dense tangle of dialogue and cues. Some audience members were said to be unhappy at seeing teleprompters on stage. Those problems seem to have been ironed out. At the press preview I saw, Erivo fumbled a few lines but otherwise gave a commanding display in a Kip Williams production that is part theatre, part cinema.
As in the Australian director’s hit adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray (immaculately interpreted by the Succession star Sarah Snook), the stage is sometimes so crowded with camera operators and stage crew that it’s not always easy to see Erivo.
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The shallow rake in the stalls makes this theatre a less than ideal setting for Marg Horwell’s handsome scenic design: I spent at least half the evening watching the action on the large screen hanging overhead. Yet it becomes a hallucinatory experience all the same. If you’re a fan of Stoker’s multi-layered mixture of diaries and letters you’ll be relieved to learn that the director treats the book with more respect than he accorded Oscar Wilde’s tale, which he injected with a fatal dose of smirking camp.
Erivo plays 23 characters, some live and some pre-recorded
DANIEL BOUD
I’m not sure it was really necessary for this Dracula to sound as if he’d wandered in from downtown Lagos, but Erivo’s gaunt, androgynous features certainly give her an otherworldly air.
Starting the evening in modern-day vest and trousers, she slips into a string of Victorian costumes as she flits between characters such as the solicitor Jonathan Harker and his fiancée, Mina. Others, including a Professor van Helsing — like a Gothic version of Rick Wakeman — appear only on the recorded videos that are ingeniously interlaced with the live action.
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The format is distracting at first. You can’t help noticing Erivo’s head mic and the edging of her wigs when the cameras catch them in close-up. But then the story, and Clemence Williams’s Romantic score, begin to take hold.
Kip Williams has spiced up the sensuality of the novel a tad, and there’s an odd moment when Arthur Holmwood, fiancé of the Count’s victim Lucy Westenra, indulges in some very un-Victorian effing and blinding. Anyone unfamiliar with the novel may find the climactic chase slightly confusing, yet the snow falling from above and Erivo’s sudden eruption into an original song add genuine operatic grandeur.
★★★★☆
110min
Noël Coward Theatre, London, to May 30, draculawestend.com