FOLLOWING 16 months of darkness, Belfast’s Lyric Theatre pretty much exploded with excitement as it reopened on Thursday night.
The Drama Studio’s impressive account of Dracula had been postponed from its scheduled run in June 2020.
By happy coincidence, Bram Stoker’s 19th century tale of vampires sealing a hellish fate via a kiss chimed perfectly with the pandemic. As one of the characters says, we are all infected.
Was it worth the wait? Of course it was. Seeing real people acting against a clever set, with upper areas where sinister, attractive Count Dracula (Kevin Canavan) could pop up is important.
As audience member Patrice commented at the end: “It’s the emotional connection that really counts.”
Scottish poet Liz Lochhead’s version of this dark tale of the undead is feisty, fun and very astute. We enter the world of Stoker but also of Conan Doyle (think of those wolves) and a corner of the Bronte sitting room, vide Wuthering Heights.
What director Philip Crawford has done particularly well is get the tone right. With gothic Victorian fiction that wears its exaggeration like a badge of pride, it’s easy to overdo things.
They don’t, and the scene with the sirens writhing round poor Jonathan Harker (Steven Cooke, nicely tormented) was in my view an improvement on the same scene in Coppola’s movie of Count Dracula, even though that involved Monica Bellucci and seriously floaty costumes.
Lucy (Holly Demaine ) and Renfield (Dylan Breen) were probably the stand out actors. She embodied the troubled younger sister brilliantly and when she got the Transylvanian kiss, her writhing and screams were superlative.
But the whole second half powered on to the famously nasty denouement very well, leaving us on the edge of our seats as poor Renfield, like some Shakespearean Fool, spouted the truth that nobody heard until it was too late.
There is a sizeable sub-text about the breakthrough into the newly minted 20th century. There is a funny scene in which grand Mina encourages Florrie (Sorcha Ní Cheallaigh in Julie Walters mode) to stop calling her Miss, before reprimanding her for an untidy room.
The past, with the cruelty in the asylum and the outdated attitudes to female sexuality, hangs around like Dracula’s sinister vowel sounds in your head.
Yet among the hammer blows there is hope and a message: “May God forgive all his poor creatures, the living and the dead”.
Dracula runs at the Lyric Theatre (028 9038 1081, lyrictheatre.co.uk) until tomorrow.
