From defying gravity to defying mortality – Cynthia Erivo gives an extraordinary, shape shifting performance in this one-woman multimedia adaptation of Bram Stoker’s vampire tale, from Australian adapter-director Kip Williams.
Shaven-headed, preternaturally physically ripped and androgynous, her expressive hands lengthened into talons by nail extensions, the Wicked star juggles costumes and accents, interacting with onscreen versions of herself in a hectic 120-minute canter through the Gothic tale. Her performance triumphantly walks a knife edge between virtuosity and absurdity.
This is a more straightforward piece of storytelling than Williams’s 2024 solo version of The Picture of Dorian Gray with Sarah Snook, where camera filters critiqued contemporary obsessions with image. Erivo has also opened cold in the West End (Snook had done Dorian in Sydney).
Her first two performances were cancelled and there were several minor hesitations and stumbles in the final preview that most critics attended due to a scheduling conflict. Still this marks a bravura return to the stage for a performer who’s gone from Stockwell to winning a Tony, Emmy and two Grammys (plus two Oscar nominations) in 15 years. Go south London! Anyone experiencing Erivo’s Dracula without preconceptions or comparisons will be sucked in.
It starts quietly: she enters the bare, black stage in a singlet, trousers and trainers and lies down. A camera overhead captures her, full-length, on a giant oblong screen. Recorded, shadowy versions of her start to glitch and jitter from the outline of the recumbent form.
Donning a wig and shirt she begins to tell the story as Jonathan Harker, the British solicitor sent to Dracula’s castle, in breathlessly animated Received Pronunciation. A squad of camera operators track and live-broadcast her image. Throughout, the screen rises and falls to reveal a white-lit rotunda, an eerie graveyard, or a vulval, pleated, heart-shaped doorway, from Carpathia to London to Whitby. The soundtrack roves from Edvard Greig to bleepy trance.
It’s onscreen that Erivo’s Harker meets her incarnation of a heritage-appropriate, Nigerian-accented Dracula and his three brides. A nice visual joke about the vampire having no reflection prompts the first of several wry sidelong glances flicked at the audience.
Later, Erivo dons wigs and skirts and recalibrates her voice to play Harker’s fiancée Mina and her friend Lucy; then spectacles to play psychiatrist Dr Seward and comic Saruman tresses for a guttural Van Helsing. It’s to her credit, and Williams’s, that one sometimes loses track of which character is being broadcast live and which is recorded. The integration is mostly seamless. Personifications of Irish and American characters are knowingly ridiculous, but Dracula always had a vein of camp.
Williams accentuates the Victorian novel’s barely-repressed queer subtext and general air of heavy-breathing lasciviousness. The count is a magenta-haired succubus. Women, alive and undead, yearn for fulfilment. Renfield, Dracula’s insane acolyte, has been imprisoned for “sexual perversity”.
Williams also foregrounds the idea that Dracula is not an external monster but a manifestation of desire within us all. The novel is told through multiple perspectives and formats – letters, diary entries, newspaper reports – so it makes sense that all the selves and stories flower and flow from the small, slight figure of Erivo, as if from Stoker himself. The writer was general manager of the Lyceum theatre under Sir Henry Irving and envisaged Dracula as a role for his charismatic boss.
Which also answers the question of why we need another adaptation now. There have been over 200 since 1897, with two London stagings and two films in the last year alone. But Dracula has always been theatrical, endlessly reviveable, and a vehicle for a star.
Williams nods to this by having Erivo briefly filmed as a trio of screen Draculas: the suave Bela Lugosi/Christopher Lee nobleman, the skeletal Nosferatu, and a jerry-curled 20th-century dude. Bringing her back to the London stage generates a real buzz and reminds us there was always much, much more to her than the green-skinned Elphaba.
She even sings a little, powerfully and unaccompanied, at the intense and chilling denouement, her image projected large, onto a screen now shaped like a crucifix, amid a dazzling blizzard. Brrrr-illiant.
To 30 May, draculawestend.com
