Theatre review: Dracula (Noël Coward Theatre)

After an incredibly high-profile couple of years on the Wicked promotional tour that blurred the lines between press junket and mental breakdown, Cynthia Erivo returns to the West End to hold space with the undead. Kip Williams adapts Bram Stoker's Dracula into a one-woman show although in reality, apart from a couple of added fucks near the end, this text is more abridgement than adaptation: Keeping the epistolary form of the novel, Erivo narrates the story of an ancient Romanian vampire who moves to the UK to build up his real estate portfolio and/or army of the damned. On stage she predominantly plays the three rather dull narrators, Jonathan Harker, the lawyer who first visits Dracula's castle and nearly dies there, Jonathan's fiancée Mina, whose best friend Lucy becomes the vampire's victim, and Dr Seward, who's also there.

She also plays all the other characters, but for the most part these are pre-recorded performances that are projected on a screen, with cameras following her around the stage so that the live Erivo can interact on stage with her digital alter egos.

This is evidently Williams' signature style which has got him a lot of praise in the past, but on this evidence it's a highly flawed concept that plays out as if Jamie Lloyd thought "but what if we could get the audience to engage even less with what's actually happening on stage?" It certainly doesn't help that the production isn't a particularly good fit to the Noël Coward, so for those of us sitting in the higher levels the screens where everything's going on aren't actually visible a lot of the time.

Fortunately Marg Horwell's designs cleverly move the screens around the stage, so when they come downstage we get to see the idea behind Craig Wilkinson's video designs: Erivo in a variety of costumes and frightwigs to play the characters she then gets blended in with, and why Renfield has a ponytail is anybody's guess, when you'd think an actor with a shaved head would have a fairly obvious look ready to go for a Victorian asylum inmate.

But when the screens aren't visible there's little to go by other than Erivo's vocal performance, which is admittedly a feat, not of acting but of endurance: She has to rattle through an entire novel so quickly and incomprehensibly there's little room to get any actual acting in; I don't know who ordered a two-hour performance of Not I but it definitely wasn't me. It's not like you can even see her on stage half the time - if she hasn't scuttled into a little separate chamber she's usually surrounded by steadicam operators. With little to look at and the narration on fast forward I spent a lot of the time staring at the Coward's chandelier while wondering if "Kip" is short for "Kippers for breakfast Aunt Helga, is it St. Swithin's Day already?"

Also Dracula has a Nigerian accent which is never explained but does seem to be deliberate; given a few final words from him I suspect this is meant to be a reference to, and inversion of, the original novel's xenophobic narrative. But as Williams hasn't actually relocated him in the script and the castle is still surrounded by Transylvanian peasants, it just seems like old Vlad just spent a lot of time building up his property portfolio in Lagos before moving on to Whitby, and picked up the accent. And at one point the stage is dominated by a big red love heart so I guess that bit takes place in a themed sex motel? All in all, a weird evening without ever managing to turn the weirdness into something interesting.

Dracula by Bram Stoker in an abridgement by Kippers for breakfast Aunt Helga, is it St. Swithin's Day already? Williams is booking until the 30th of May at the Noël Coward Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours straight through.

Photo credit: Daniel Boud.