The creatures dangle and spin upside down from the rafters, unfurling like leaves. They are both bats and brides. As they lower themselves towards the stage, their black ribbon-ropes spread out to engulf the solitary man beneath. The circular stage is a dark, bare place, into which an occasional bed or desk rises from unseen depths. The silence is splintered by amplified clinkings, heartbeats, scrapings – and one terrible squelch.
The first half of Theresa Heskins’s production of Dracula is one of the most impressive hours I’ve spent in the theatre for months. The acrobatics are exciting but expressive. Daniella Beattie’s lighting and Laura Clarkson’s design – black, with a few splashes of scarlet – beautifully combine spareness and boldness. The use of sound, designed by James Earls-Davis and Alex Day, is electrifying. Live effects are created by actors who perch at the top of the highly raked stalls, spectrally illuminated. You can’t see a door on stage but you hear the rasp of a key in a lock. You barely glimpse wine being poured into a glass but you hear it glugging joyously in. The crackle of an old phonograph accompanies recordings of psychotic case histories. Vampire fodder is squished.
The invention that creates these noises, the Foley work, is detailed in an unusually useful programme note. The noise of walking in snow is produced by a leather pouch, cornflour and celery sticks. Antibacterial gel and an egg box are used for the sound of blood-sucking. The effect is both intimate and explosive: as if someone were hissing in your ear.
These effects, and Heskins’s able adaptation, are almost enough to make Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel look psychologically adroit. The story has always been phosphorescent with biological and historical interest. Stoker started to write it two years after the Jack the Ripper killings, and published it two years after the appearance of Freud’s Studies on Hysteria. He was Henry Irving’s business manager, and in Dracula conjured up a being whose pallor and vitality were much like the mighty actor whom he greatly admired and who might be thought to have sucked him dry. Here’s another thing. Stoker was an occasional theatre critic. There are those who would see something vampiric in that.
Heskins’s production does not feature cape swishing or fang flashing. Its dynamism and fine detail suggest significance in the melodrama. Still, she cannot disguise some bunkum at the bloody heart of the thing. Freud hardly needs to be summoned to quiz these male impalers and female swooners. Stoker under-characterised: “She has changed… Her teeth are sharper.” He also overwrote and overexplained. There is rather too much about the admin involved in carting around coffins full of earth.
There is bright acting – not least from Jasmine Blackborow who, making her debut as the doomed ingenue, is frisky as a squirrel before she gets her blood sucked. But there are some gruelling accents. As Dracula, poor Jack Klaff can’t do much more than tilt his cheekbones and growl: “Enter of your own free weeeeeel.” Still, as Maria Miller nearly said, it’s always worth entering the New Vic. In the case of Dracula, less for the story than the sensations. And the especially themed meal. The theatre restaurant is serving “stake”.
