"Dracula, the Ur-vampire and ultimate outsider of the literary canon, is played by Cynthia Erivo, along with every other character, in this deliciously wicked tale of the blood-sucking count. Except it's not deliciously wicked in adapter-director Kip Williams' stage reinvention. Williams has proven himself a Midas-touched spinner of old stories to new. His one-woman version of The Picture of Dorian Gray was deliriously original. His take on Jean Genet's The Maids was punk inspired. What has happened here?"
"Erivo dons wigs and skirts and recalibrates her voice to play Harker's fiancee Mina and her friend Lucy; then spectacles to play psychiatrist Dr Seward and comic Saruman tresses for a guttural Van Helsing. It's to her credit, and Williams', that one sometimes loses track of which character is being broadcast live and which is recorded. The integration is mostly seamless. Personifications of Irish and American characters are knowingly ridiculous, but Dracula always had a vein of camp."
"It's refreshing to see Erivo get to own her queerness on stage, licking her lips lasciviously as a lace-decked Lucy who's in sexual thrall to an androgynous Dracula or strutting confidently in a masculine vest with silver chains (a welcome escape from her feminine get-ups in Wicked). She unleashes her ethereal voice to haunting, vulpine effect in the final scenes, where she finally gets to embody Dracula"
Cynthia Erivo portrays Dracula and every other character in Kip Williams' one-woman stage reinvention. The production relies heavily on camera operators, stage crew, and a large overhead screen, which sometimes obscures the live performance and shifts focus to projected imagery. Marg Horwell's scenic design is handsome but challenged by the theatre's shallow rake, prompting significant screen-watching. The blend of live and recorded elements produces a hallucinatory effect. Erivo uses wigs, costumes, and vocal recalibration to inhabit Mina, Lucy, Dr Seward, Van Helsing and more. The performance embraces camp and queer sexuality, culminating in an ethereal, vulpine embodiment of Dracula.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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