Liz Kettle makes a striking Dracula. Fingers spindly, hair swept back, black cloak voluminous, she possesses the ability to pop up at will on Kenneth MacLeod’s crepuscular set of gantries, ladders and ramps. She radiates power.
Yet in Morna Pearson’s retelling of the Bram Stoker novel for the National Theatre of Scotland and Aberdeen Performing Arts, this vampire exerts most power in his absence. Kettle arrives several scenes into the first act, the slow buildup adding to the mystique, and is quick to retreat into the shadows. As the face of evil, she is unnerving; as the abstract idea of evil, she is more unsettling still.
Moving the location north from Whitby to Aberdeen, Pearson tells the story from the perspective of Mina Murray, who stays at home while her fiance, Jonathan Harker, voyages to Transylvania. It allows the playwright to present Dracula first as a metaphor for the fear of the unknown and second, when he draws near, as a symbol of Faustian temptation.
The women in Sally Cookson’s all-female and non-binary production have a desire every bit as intense as that of Dracula. His thirst for blood is as urgent as their need to flee their patriarchal prison. Confined by income and marriage, they have been made mentally ill by their lack of options – or so the setting in an asylum would suggest. Like Dracula, they long for life. He is half threat, half promise of liberation.
This is the most compelling theme in a play that sometimes loses narrative energy. Danielle Jam makes a strident and intelligent Mina, but the young woman is too independently minded for a conventional love story with Jonathan (Catriona Faint), who seems half forgotten in Transylvania. Her concerns are closer to home, in particular her relationship with Lucy Westenra (Ailsa Davidson), the first to fall under Dracula’s spell. That, eventually, gives Mina the motivation to propel the story to its rebellious conclusion.
In the meantime, Cookson goes big on filmic atmosphere. Benji Bower’s score is all moody sustained notes, while lighting designer Aideen Malone and video designer Lewis Den Hertog do superb work transforming MacLeod’s set from gloomy asylum and creepy vampire lair to the craggy silhouette of Slains Castle. Rather than intimate, it is lush and imposing.
At His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, until 9 September. Touring until 28 October.
