Review of the Week: Dracula at the Noel Coward theatre

Noel Coward theatre, London WC2, until 30 May

There’s no doubt that Kip Williams’s Dracula is quite something, but what exactly is it? The visionary Australian director exploits screens and cameras to such an extent that he makes Ivo Van Hove look like a Puritan. Williams calls his innovative hybrid “cine-theatre”, but on this occasion it is more cine than theatre.

Debuted in Sydney two years ago and now turned into a West End comeback for Cynthia Erivo, Dracula is the third in Williams’s trilogy of reimagined gothic classics, following 2022’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The first in the series, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was a sensation, winning both an Olivier and a Tony for Sarah Snook, who played all 26 characters. But that text had two advantages. Firstly, it was all about image and artifice, squeezing conceptual juice out of different methods of watching and being watched. Secondly, it had the words of Oscar Wilde to play with. Bram Stoker, who published Dracula in 1897, was more of a yarn-spinner than a stylist. One does not exit Dracula (novel or play) quoting perfect nuggets of dialogue. Nor does Williams’s hi-tech spectacle breathe new life into Stoker’s sticky themes of sexuality, infection and invasion. This production is most enjoyable when it is making you feel rather than think – when, like its undead protagonist, it seduces.

Erivo is an extraordinary presence. Lithe as an athlete, with her shaven head, tattoos, piercings and Nosferatu-like talons, she makes her entrance looking ultra-modern and diamond-hard, yet somehow possessed by the prissy, Victorian spirit of hapless lawyer Jonathan Harker as he embarks on the world’s worst work trip to Transylvania. Erivo plays the four narrators – Harker, his brisk, brave wife Mina, the neurotic doctor John Seward and the glamorously doomed Lucy Westenra – plus, at last, the Count himself, whose regal Nigerian accent is a fresh twist on imperial blowback: the colonised becomes the coloniser. Her other roles, as many as four at a time, are pre-recorded and deftly blended on the giant screen by video designer Craig Wilkinson.

The volume of action on screen takes some getting used to. With their selection box of facial hair and wigs, Lucy’s three squabbling suitors and a ludicrous prog-rock Van Helsing initially give the impression of a sketch-show caper, while the three female vampires who entrance Harker seem to be modelled on a Pointer Sisters video. Jump! It is strange, too, to spend two hours watching a virtuosic actor barely acknowledge the audience, so precisely must she interact with the camera operators. The screen is so much busier than the stage that the chief incentive to lower your eyes to the real, live Erivo is to marvel at the logistics. This dissonance is nicely exploited when Harker looks in a mirror and cannot see Dracula’s reflection, because of course we can’t see him on stage either. For most of the night he is a digital apparition, sometimes melting into a hallucinatory blur, more like a manifestation of ravenous desire than a tangible entity.

Once you adjust to the movieness of it all, there is plenty to enjoy: the camera offering a rat’s eye view as Seward is chased through a crypt, or gliding in and out of a rotating lightbox. The screen rises and falls like a curtain to enable seamless set changes – a chaotic graveyard, a deathbed garlanded with flowers – before intersecting with a second to form a luminous crucifix. Williams clearly understands the visual grammar of both horror movies and music videos.

As the storytelling grows more frantic and Clemence Williams’s score transforms from classical to choral to electronic, the production becomes a primarily sensory experience. A scene involving a red, heart-shaped door and a throbbing Björk track is so overwhelmingly sumptuous that I lost track of Erivo’s narration but I didn’t really mind. If this sounds like I’m reviewing an arena concert rather than a play, well, that’s sometimes how it felt. There’s even a brief musical number for the blood-sucker, because when you have the star of Wicked and musical theatre it would be rude not to.

Reportedly, some of the previews were let down by technical snags and botched lines, but the weakness of Dracula relative to Dorian Gray is not in the execution. Williams and his regular team (including set and costume designer Marg Horwell and lighting designer Nick Schlieper) pull off dazzling feats of audiovisual ingenuity, and Erivo earns all three of her standing ovations. No, the problem lies in the over-familiar source material. A playful video in which Erivo appears as three famous Hollywood Counts concedes that we all know the drill. This Dracula is exciting but never scary, camp yet rarely funny. When cinema has done so much with a story, perhaps the most radical move would be to switch off the screen and turn it into an actual play.