Dracula review

It begins like a fever dream. Erivo, simply dressed in a singlet and trousers, lies flat on the stage; above her, a giant screen that creates the impression of a sleepless night. The onstage action is combined with live and pre-recorded film, and as her supine figure thrashes in torment, she’s duplicated on screen, so that she appears to be splitting and multiplying. Nick Schlieper’s blue and silver lighting plays stunningly off her muscular limbs and the planes of her face. So far, so arresting.

But as we embark on the narrative itself, conventionality creeps in, despite the videographers in black and the helpers with the wigs and scraps of costume with which Erivo is adorned at various points – all of whom scurry around her. She begins the story with first-person delivery as a clipped Jonathan Harker, and, later, a breathless, rather wet Mina. She’s also a scarlet-wigged, velvet-robed count, whose accent is, in an interesting touch, African rather than the traditional cod, Hammer-style Eastern European drawl, and whose highly polished, long, pointed false nails are clawlike. This Dracula looks more like a vampire chanteuse than either Gary Oldman’s decaying dandy or Christopher Lee’s coiffed and caped creation – as do the three vampire brides whom Erivo also embodies. There are, in addition, a Van Helsing with a Gandalf-ish wig, a blonde seductress Lucy in a transparent lace dress and an eerily serene Renfield, languishing in an asylum in a snow-white straitjacket, as well as Lucy’s three eager and absurd suitors.

Cynthia Erivo seems ill at ease with the material – there’s a hesitancy about her performance

There’s a nod to more familiar models – brief onscreen appearances of Erivo dressed up like Lee or Murnau’s Nosferatu – but crucially, the reinvention with which we’re presented isn’t anywhere near as persuasive as those movie antecedents. There’s little force, little fatal allure, to this glamorous predator; the show’s thesis, it emerges, is that there’s something of the bloodsucker in all of us, but the idea feels tacked on in the final minutes.

Still, the device of Erivo’s spectral selves, appearing in digital form and vanishing on cue, cleverly summons a sense of the supernatural. And there is some pleasing spectacle: a cellar packed with coffins; the swift conjuring of a chamber shaped like a heart or a wild snowstorm viewed through a cruciform peephole; the undead Lucy gliding uncannily through mid-air. Clemence Williams’ compositions and Jessica Dunn’s sound design blend thumping heartbeats with Grieg’s Peer Gynt and club beats, and a smattering of modern slang exclamations in the period dialogue – “okay!”, “fuck!” – reminds us that this is a story that lives with us timelessly.

Yet it lacks potency – a disappointment underlined when, towards the end, Erivo begins, in the guise of the cornered Count, to sing. It’s beautiful, but its intention eluded me; an incongruous topper to a show that overall is, well – bloodless. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it sucks, but it certainly doesn’t bite.

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