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by Liz Lochhead, directed by Eda Holmes

Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

August 4-October 14, 2017

Florrie: “Bogies is all kinds and sorts of things except bogies”

With the fine Shaw Festival ensemble, an insightful director like Eda Holmes and a design team including Camellia Koo and Kevin Lamotte, the Festival has all the means necessary to produce a gripping production of Dracula.  The work fits into the Festival’s original mandate since Bram Stoker’s novel was written in  1897 and the most famous stage adaptation by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston from 1927 became the basis of the famous 1931 film starring Bela Lugosi.  It was the 1977 production of this play that won the Tony Award for Best Revival that year.

The trouble is that the Shaw Festival did not decide to revive the Deane/Balderston stage version.  Instead, it staged the 1985 revisionist version by Scottish poet and playwright Liz Lochhead, whose dubious achievement is to make the potentially exciting story extremely boring.  Lochhead, as a feminist, is more interested in the the female characters of the story than the male and that, unfortunately, includes Dracula himself, who appears surprisingly seldom.  For many audience members, Lochhead, in building up her case about the treatment of women in the 19th century, has missed the central reason why most people would choose to see a play called Dracula. 

In her programme notes Aoise Stratford quotes Lochhead’s 2009 introduction to the play in which she says, “I always knew – who couldn’t? – that Dracula was a narrative of suppressed sexuality and sexual guilt, but I am amazed at how much this, and especially heterosexual female sexual guilt ... pervades my own account of the tale on subterranean levels”.  In her Director’s Note, Eda Holmes restates this idea by saying, “Liz Lochhead’s adaptation goes further to explore the specific Victorian fear and repression of female sexuality”.  Attractive as it may be to approach the play from this point of view, Lochhead has difficulty covering all the events of Stoker’s novel without contradicting her supposed goal.  Perhaps, Lochhead always knew that Dracula was “a narrative of suppressed sexuality and sexual guilt”, but it is also about much more than that which it why the story has so thoroughly pervaded popular culture.     

Those familiar with the novel will know that this “master” is Count Dracula, but Lochhead has Renfield speak of this long before Dracula’s name is ever mentioned.  In fact, Lochhead focusses far more on Renfield than on Dracula himself and makes him into one of the play’s heroes.  Yet, despite this, Lochhead never shows us any service Renfield provides Dracula once he arrives in England.  In fact, as soon as Dracula arrives, Renfield defies him and is fatally blasted by the vampire.  Then Lochhead treats us to the nurses of the asylum washing Renfield’s body in ironic imitation of Medieval and Renaissance paintings of Christ’s entombment (cf. Luduvico Carracci’s The Lamentation [c.1582]).

Besides making much of a minor character, the obvious question is what all this attention to Renfield has to do with Lochhead’s supposed theme of “suppressed sexuality and sexual guilt”.  Renfield, who has shown no signs of any sexual orientation, is one of Dracula’s victims and helps to save Mina from him.  At most he serves as a crude illustration of vampirism in his belief that his life depends on consuming other lives.  But then, before Dracula’s arrival, Lochhead has Renfield gain a conscience and reject this notion.  Thus, every every time the play recurs to the servant rather than his master feels like an unnecessary digression.

The only character who really illustrates Lochhead’s point is Lucy Westerman (Charissa Richards), whose family name Lochhead has unaccountably changed from Westenra in Stoker.  She is the most overtly sensual character in the play and jokes about how there are three men who want to marry her.  Suffering from depression over her father’s death puts her into an altered mental state that makes her, like Renfield, subject to Dracula’s psychic influence. 

Contrary to the novel, Lochhead decides to make Dr. Seward, who is one of her suitors, rather unbelievably the man she chooses to marry instead of the wealthy (unseen) Arthur Holmwood.  Today psychiatrists are forbidden to have any sexual contact with patients under their care let alone marry them.  By eliminating Holmwood, Lochhead is trying to force Lucy into an unequal relationship where the man is dominant over her.  What make’s this symbolism so artificial is that Lucy chooses Seward herself from among her other suitors.  Nevertheless, Lochhead gets the situation she wants.  Lucy suggests sex before marriage and Seward stalwartly refuses.  While Lochhead wants this to demonstrate the Victorian male’s fear of female sexuality, we might rather think Seward is trying to preserve some professional ethics.

Seward and his friend Jonathan Harker (Ben Sanders) have much more to fear when Lucy becomes Dracula’s first victim upon his arrival in England and is turned into a vampire herself.  Lucy thus becomes the prime symbol of how monstrous unrestrained female sexuality can be and how it must be violently subdued.  What this feminist reading seems to forget is that Lucy’s ferocious hidden sexuality is released by a male character.

For unknown reasons, Lochhead has decided to make Mina (Marla McLean), who is Lucy’s poorer friend in the novel, into Lucy’s sister.  She is Jonathan’s fiancée and looks down on Lucy’s flirtatiousness and flippancy.  Quite contrary to Lucy and to Lochhead’s thesis, when Jonathan suggests sex before marriage, Mina says no.  Yet, she becomes prey to Dracula’s influence and while Lochhead means this to show she is liberated from sexual repression, when Mina is “saved” from Dracula it’s hard not to look on this as a good thing.

To the regular characters of Stoker’s novel, Lochhead adds a new character, Florrie (Natasha Mumba), the Westermans’ maid.  The sole purpose of this character is for Lochhead to expand her critique of Victorian society.  Mina preaches human equality but then treats Florrie like a maid anyway.  Florrie’s lover gets her pregnant before he goes off to die for the British Empire.  Thus, Florrie becomes a victim of male Imperialist society in parallel to Lucy and Mina’s victimhood by men’s supposed repression of their sexuality.  Since the addition of Florrie does not move the story forward, she is there only to make us view all of the main characters negatively – an unnecessary action since Lochhead has failed to make us care about any of them in the first place.

The fine actors of the Festival do what they can with this dull retelling of Stoker’s novel.  Three actor especially shine.  Graeme Somerville’s Renfield is the play’s only genuinely frightening character.  Somerville plays him much like Shakespeare’s Poor Tom in King Lear, except that Poor Tom was a sane man pretending to be mad whereas Renfield actually is mad.  Although Renfield is locked in a cage, Somerville shows us the most chilling side of madness – the feeling of being locked inside one’s own self-punishing mind. 

Cherissa Richards is excellent as Lucy.  She carefully modulates Lucy’s bouts of levity and depression while healthy into their more extreme forms of rage and resentment while under Dracula’s influence.  She illustrates better than anyone how vampirism, symbolically, is life lived without social or ethical fetters.

From Allan Louis’s performance as a ballroom dance enthusiast in Athol Fugard’s “Master Harold”...and the Boys last year, you would never know him capable of playing such an iconic figure as Dracula.  Yet, he is superb.  Louis adopts a vaguely Slavic accent, but steers clear of anything remotely like Bela Lugosi’s interpretation.  Instead, Louis emphasizes Dracula’s supreme elegance, self-confidence and easy power of domination.  As Louis’s Dracula touches Harker, he gives the impression that Dracula is exercising extreme self-control in refraining from attacking him.  Louis’s greatest achievement is in portraying the vampire as power personified that gives power, albeit with negative consequences, to those he infects. 

Lochhead’s other characters, are unfortunately all underwritten.  There’s very little difference between Martin Happer’s Dr. Seward and Ben Sanders’ Jonathan Harker.  They are both stiff-upper lip British male stereotypes, with Seward having a greater air of authority than the weaker Harker.  Marla McLean struggles to make straight-laced Mina interesting or even sympathetic.  Only when she is in Dracula’s power, does McLean have to show she can also play otherworldly ferocity. 

Steven Sutcliffe has the unenviable role of vampirologist Abraham Van Helsing.  Although Lochhead tries to keep her play free of camp as much as possible, it’s hard not to laugh when Van Helsing unpacks his anti-vampire kit of garlic, asafoetida, crucifixes, stakes and hammer.  Sutcliffe can’t match the intensity of Edward Van Sloan’s Van Helsing of the classic movie.  Instead, Sutcliffe makes the expert seem like a rather nerdish professional dutifully going about his distasteful work.

The physical production is well conceived.  Holmes has Camellia Koo’s medical curtain dividers whisk about to change scenes while also creating the impression that the entire play takes place in Seward’s mental asylum.  Were Holmes to strengthen this concept she would lend a new interpretation to the story that might help make up for the play’s deficiencies.  Kevin Lamotte ensures the lighting is appropriately gloomy.  What will disturb many frequent Shaw Festival fans is that the entire cast wear body mics when that is totally unnecessary in the Festival Theatre.  The small number of vocal sound effects does not justify miking the entire show.

It is a pity that of all the many stage adaptations of Stoker’s novel, the Festival should choose one so concerned with turning the story into a socio-sexual allegory that it completely neglects tension, suspense and even dramatic conflict.  Even Lochhead’s happy ending where Jonathan and Mina forgive each other for their separate dalliances with vampires seems ridiculous.  The ending would be much stronger if each forever harboured fears of the darker side of the other.  The worse sin a play can commit is to be boring.  Lochhead’s Dracula should have had a stake driven through its beating heart long ago.  The trouble is that it doesn’t have one.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (from top) Cherissa Richards as Lucy and Allan Louis as Dracula; Graeme Somerville as Renfield. ©2017 David Cooper.  Cherissa Richards as a Vampire Bride and Ben Sanders as Harker; Martin Happer as Dr. Seward, Marla McLean as Mina, Ben Sanders as Harker and Steven Sutcliffe as Van Helsing. ©2017 Emily Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.