While sitting in the bar of a London theatre with Stephen Schwartz a couple of years ago our conversation turned from a revival of his musical The Baker’s Wife to Cynthia Erivo, who had been cast as the green witch Elphaba for the film versions of Schwartz’s smash musicalWicked.
Not a man easily impressed, Schwartz gushed about Erivo’s “enormous gifts as an actress and singer”, which is is no mean feat when you consider the bar for playing Elphaba had previously been set by “Queen of Broadway” Idina Menzel in the original stage version.
The acting side of these gifts are on full display in this one-woman spectacular adaptation of Bram Stoker’s gothic novel. During 110 uninterrupted minutes the British performer segues through 23 roles including the mother of all vampires, Count Dracula.
Accompanied only by black-clad stage hands and camera operators handling the kind of kit used to keep up with the action in sporting events, Erivo’s main role here is that of storyteller.
She gallops through director Kip William’s faithful 20,000-word adaptation of the novel. Barely a hiccup interrupts her rip-tide flow. Dominating the stage is a giant LED screen on which live feeds magnifies the performance.
Live video no longer feels like a ground-breaking technique. Jamie Lloyd pushed the boundaries with cameras that followed his performers backstage in the case of Sunset Boulevard. For opening night director Ivo van Hove filmed a scene with Sheridan Smith on the pavement outside the theatre.
Williams’s innovation is to integrate pre-recorded characters with whoever Erivo may be performing live on stage at the time. Often live and recorded performances talk to each other. Sometimes one figure passes in front of another just as two actors might on a set.
During all these bamboozling special effects Erivo has fun with basic acting skills, switching accents, genders, wigs and costumes, all before our very eyes. There is an air of Victorian freak show as Erivo shape-shifts her way through such roles as Jonathan Harker, the besuited, guileless solicitor sent to Transylvania; Mina, his chaste wife; and Lucy Westenra, Mina’s sexually adventurous blonde best friend, Dracula’s fist English victim. There is also Dracula himself of course, a catwalk vision of fangs, talons for fingernails, topped by a close-cropped shock of red hair.
The show is a mesmerising sight. Yet the evening never achieves the tension generated by many other West End dabblings in the supernatural, among them Inside No 9 or Andy Nyman’s Ghost Stories, not to mention the longest-running gothic novel adaptation of them all, The Woman in Black, all of which trigger the cold sweat of fear.
This is chiefly down to Williams being less interested in creating jump scares than he is in exploring the art of acting, just as he did with The Picture of Dorian Gray starring Succession’s Sarah Snook, which also exploded live performance across massive video screens.
In that sense these one-person shows are much more about a showboating performer than they are the story they are telling. Although, as is the case here, showboating can be very entertaining
Dracula
Noel Coward Theatre
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