Venue: Roslyn Packer Theatre (Sydney NSW), Jul 2 – Aug 4, 2024
Writer: Bram Stoker (adapted by Kip Williams)
Director: Kip Williams
Cast: Zahra Newman
Images by Daniel Boud
Theatre review
In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, mortality is under constant threat, by its central immortal figure. Fear is represented entirely by deathlessness, the very phenomenon we desire the most. In Kip Williams’ single-performer stage adaptation, we see that all this struggle and terror, exists completely within one’s mind. In a story about petrifying phantoms and alarming apparitions, otherness is presented as being utterly heinous, yet only located on the inside.
It may be the old adage, “the only thing to fear is fear itself”, that we so clearly see in actor Zahra Newman’s sublimely rhapsodic performance, as her body and mind masterfully transform before our eyes, into 23 different characters from Stoker’s legendary work. We observe the astonishing courage of a person undertaking a manifestly herculean task, making a persuasive argument in this tour de force about horror and paranoia, demonstrating that what may be only a figment of a person’s imagination, can lead to absolutely devastating consequences.
Combining stage and screen, Williams’ cine-theatre approach deals perfectly with competing concepts of reality and delusion. On film, all manner of fantastical imagery can be shown, and the audience easily invests in its fiction, no matter how extravagant. By contrast, the materiality of the live format is used simultaneously to expose the truth, and we find ourselves in a constant state of discombobulation, experiencing both aspects, virtually at the same time. Williams’ ability to deliver that delightfully bizarre sensation, of being immersed in circumstances that are at once congruent and divergent, is theatrical magic at its most sensational. In Dracula, we learn that art and technology can coalesce to deliver a psychological effect that could perhaps neve be encountered otherwise, and reveal something quite fundamental about how we are.
The immense video work is designed by Craig Wilkinson, whose inventiveness leaves us breathless time and again. Marg Howell’s costumes and sets are consistently surprising, and marvellous in the sense of cohesiveness they manufacture for a show that dares to be thoroughly unhinged. Lights by Nick Schlieper give us seamless and balanced visuals, every which way we choose to position our eyes. Music by Clemence Williams and sounds by Jessica Dunn, are relentlessly gripping, and memorable for being unabashedly dramatic, in their delicious interpretations of Stoker and his essential flamboyance.
The human imagination is unequivocally powerful. It can twist material realities into infinite different meanings, that in turn spur us onto wildly varying trajectories. Our mind has great capacities, yet we can never claim to have real control over it. Count Dracula may or may not be who they think he is, but there is certainly no doubting their dismal failure at ever hoping to resist his allure.
Suzy Goes See 