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.

Theatre review: The Confessions

A British / Australian / Luxembourgish co-production, Alexander Zeldin's The Confessions, which he also directs at the Lyttelton, is based on conversations with his mother and her peers, and follows one woman's life from Australia in 1943 - when, as a child, she meets her father for the first time returning from the war and is confused because she thought the portrait of him on the wall was her father - to London in 2021, when she finally tells her son, who's been quizzing her just like the real author, to stop poking around for more details of her life. For the most part Amelda Brown narrates the story as the older Alice, while Eryn Jean Norvill plays her younger self in the scenes, but they occasionally trade places at particularly critical moments; perhaps Alice is so shaken by these events she steps out of her body, and can only confront them with the benefit of time.