The Australian writer-director Kip Williams was behind 2024’s hit West End staging of “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. Starring the “Succession” actress Sarah Snook, who played all the parts, Williams used “head-turning live-capture wizardry”, giant screens and pre-filmed sections to mesmeric effect.
Now he is back with a “radical” “Dracula”, in which the British film star Cynthia Erivo plays all 23 characters. It’s not “flawless” – not quite as frightening as you’d hope – but it’s a “tour de force” even so.
Erivo is “extraordinary”, said Nick Curtis in The London Standard. Juggling costumes, wigs and accents, and interacting with “onscreen versions of herself”, she has to walk “a knife edge between virtuosity and absurdity”, and pulls it off triumphantly.
This “Dracula” is certainly an astonishing technical achievement, said Dominic Maxwell in The Sunday Times. But it is also (“I’ll get the pun in early”) disappointingly “bloodless”. I wanted more dread, more drama and – paradoxically – more Erivo. Seemingly swamped at points by the technical wizardry, she is left struggling to connect with the audience.
The basic problem, said Andrzej Lukowski in Time Out, is that Erivo is required to “portray multiple characters of roughly the same importance at the same time”. Williams tries to get around this by making use of a lot more pre-recording than he did for “Dorian Gray”, but the result is that the “real” – onstage – Erivo mostly plays the less interesting parts. Some of the characters here “verge on stereotypes”, and the “ropey selection of wigs and facial hair that the pre-recorded Erivo sports add a weirdly goofy note to proceedings”.
Williams’ gimmicky camera-led approach “just about” worked with “Dorian Gray” because that is a story about narcissism, said Sarah Crompton on WhatsOnStage. This trick simply doesn’t fly with “Dracula”: it distances us from the dread, and “flattens rather than liberates the story”. I yearned for more “fever”, more “diabolism”, agreed Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. What Williams has given us is Dracula “defanged”.
Noël Coward Theatre, London WC2. Until 30 May
British film star Cynthia Erivo plays 23 characters in a ‘radical’ reinterpretation of the vampire classic
