Liz Kettle makes a striking Dracula. Fingers spindly, hair swept back, black cloak voluminous, she possesses the ability to pop up at will on Kenneth MacLeod’s crepuscular set of gantries, ladders and ramps. She radiates power.
Yet in Morna Pearson’s retelling of the Bram Stoker novel for the National Theatre of Scotland and Aberdeen Performing Arts, this vampire exerts most power in his absence. Kettle arrives several scenes into the first act, the slow buildup adding to the mystique, and is quick to retreat into the shadows. As the face of evil, she is unnerving; as the abstract idea of evil, she is more unsettling still.
