Cynthia Erivo’s one-woman show has landed at London’s Noël Coward Theatre.
Now officially a legend of villainy, Cynthia Erivo proves her might and mettle in her one-woman production of Dracula, showing at London’s Noël Coward theatre from now until May.
Bram Stoker’s seminal gothic is brought to life in wicked – sometimes wonderful and sometimes woeful – fashion in this ultimately watchable but confused production.
Made by the same creators as Sarah Snook’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Erivo plays all 23 characters in the show, including the infamous Count and the narrators best known by those of us who did A-Level English Lit: Jonathan Harker, Mina Murray and John Seward.
Focussing first on her performance, Erivo is five-star. Her ability to shift skins from Harker’s clipped English lawyer, to the bright eyed Mina, to the doomed but delightful Lucy, was like watching the lead ballet dancer subtly change parts in Swan Lake. The first 20 minutes in particular, where Harker enters Castle Dracula, were an exemplar for how it should be done.
Her seamless transitioning between tone, tenor and gender, was also beautifully aided by the costume department led by Claire Murphy and Rachel Morris.
However I must now turn to production.
From the outset press releases have described this play as a piece of “cinetheatre”, which I now see translates to a massive homogenous screen taking up half the stage the entire time.
Upon this screen several of Erivo’s characters appear such as Van Helsing and Quincey Morris, delivering pre-recorded lines to each other, sometimes for minutes at a time.
When this occurs, the onstage actress suddenly shrinks to a supporting role and is diminished to the point I barely saw her moving about the stage.
To complicate matters further, major moments such as the graveyard scene are hit by blaring music, split screens and choppy editing to the point it came across more as an emo music video à la Panic! At The Disco than a hefty Victorian text.
Later on, this became even more pronounced as heavy synth pop and glittering set pieces joined the stage, although I did appreciate the noted symbolism of Dracula’s bite being akin to sex.
It seemed an unfortunate metaphor that as Erivo sometimes climbed across scenery and around the back of the screen, she was literally fighting for centre stage. If only production had got out her way, perhaps using simple voice-over for the other characters instead of constant visuals, the actress would have been allowed to actually shine through the fog.
It’s testament to Erivo’s skill that her performance still packed a punch throughout. However, by the law of averages a five-star performance and one-star production must equal three.
Sadly like Dracula himself, this production sits stranded in the middle, not dead, not alive, but somewhere in between.
