The first major staging of Dracula with an all-woman and non-binary cast aims to “reclaim and subvert” gothic tropes of fragile and corruptible females by retelling the genre classic through the eyes of Mina Murray.
In Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Murray’s fiance, the solicitor Jonathan Harker, clumsily embroils Mina and her friend Lucy in Dracula’s bloodlust when he travels to Transylvania to assist the count in a property purchase. However, the new National Theatre of Scotland production puts Mina at the centre of the action.
Set in a psychiatric hospital in Aberdeenshire in 1897, Dracula: Mina’s Reckoning is a unique Scottish adaptation that tells the familiar story through her eyes, assisted by an ensemble of asylum inmates led by a non-binary Renfield, the Count’s devoted servant.
“The novel is wonderful,” says director Sally Cookson, Olivier award-winner and associate artist at Bristol Old Vic. “But I was always very aware of how the male characters had all the power.”
Bram Stoker hinted at Mina’s fascination with the New Woman, the feminist ideal of independence embodied in the suffragette movement, Cookson explains, “but he never really allows her to become one; she’s not allowed to join in the vampire hunt, he continually locks her up for her own safety, and then tidily marries her off [to Harker] at the end of the story”.
“What would happen if Mina’s ambition was not to get married and have children?”
Writer Morna Pearson says: “Mina stuck out a mile as a theatrical protagonist. The world is still made for men in many respects, and what the play examines is: how do you gain power when the world isn’t made for you?”
Conscious of the number of adaptations by male writers, Pearson created a non-binary Renfield and, through research in the archives of Royal Edinburgh hospital, which opened in 1813 as a mental asylum, ensemble characters derived from real historical cases.
“Many women were placed there because they were deemed ‘deviant’, for not conforming to class or gender norms,” says Cookson. “Women were locked up because they were not obedient.”
The production, which opens at Aberdeen Performing Arts on Thursday 7 September before touring Scotland and England, is also the first staging to celebrate the novel’s Scottish roots. A growing body of research has uncovered how Stoker’s writing sojourns to Cruden Bay, on the wild Aberdeenshire coast, proved an inspiration for early drafts of the novel.
Pearson, who grew up in the north-east of Scotland, says the relocation came naturally, and the dialogue leans strongly into the local Doric language.
The atmospheric setting is crucial to its staging, adds Cookson, with video, music and lighting coming together to interpret the wildness of the dramatic coastline.
Both Pearson and Cookson say the multitude of interpretations of the Dracula story over the century afforded them a certain freedom. As Cookson puts it: “We felt liberated to go off piste.”
