Review: DRACULA, Jack Studio Theatre

Arrows and Traps enjoy a solid back catalogue of hits, innovative and ambitious, just what fringe theatre needs. Of course, the risk of innovation and ambition is that it won't always come off and in Dracula, adapter, Ross MacGregor, may have bitten off more than he can chew. What emerges is, ironically, a gory but somewhat bloodless shocker, drained of much of its tension by a pedestrian pace that ensures that we never really get our teeth into it.

Christopher Tester gives us a Count who owes more to Christopher Lee's sleek, seductive Hammer anti-hero rather than Klaus Kinski's grotesque Nosferatu - that's fine of course, but the inevitable whiff of high camp never quite leaves the room. Sure he's menacing and there's no doubt that he is torturing women in order to prolong his undead life, but that infectious sense that the giggles are threatening to burst forth intrudes too often. Maybe that's just the way things are now with such a familiar tale, for all the earnestness of the production.

The vampire has set his sights on the schoolgirlish friends, Mina and Lucy, and he pursues them to the exclusion of easier pickings elsewhere. There's a touch of Hermia and Helena about about the pair, Beatrice Vincent blushingly virginal (her new husband, sexually weakened by the Count's bloodlust) and Lucy Ioannou more coquettish and bold, leading to her ravishment at the hands - and teeth - of Dracula.

But it all takes rather too long to get from day to night, with the other characters largely peripheral. Alex Stevens delivers a decent turn as the lovelorn doctor, Jack Seward, and Conor Moss is delightful in his early scenes en route to Transylvania and cautiously greeting the Count, before spending the closing 100 minutes of the show anaemically moping about. Cornelia Baumann has a lot of fun hamming it up as asylum inmate Renfield, although she is at best tangential to the narrative and veers inevitably close to Ruddigore's Mad Margaret.

MWS Proudctions' set and Odin Corie's costumes make everything look lovely, and there's some seriously spooky lighting from Ben Jacobs, but we keep coming back to the key issues. Why is the story being played out so slowly and are we supposed to be screaming in fear or screaming with laughter?

Dracula continues at the Jack Studio Theatre until 27 October.

Photo Davor Tovarlaza @ the Ocular Creative.