A Dracula To Die For
A comedy Dracula that is billed as channeling the spirit of RuPaul, Monty Python, and Mel Brooks! What’s not to like, writes Michael Holland.
We enter to the pounding bass of Eurotrash hip-hop. I wondered if there was a connection. If not, why subject us to such torture?
The four Vampire Hunters appear and state their case, and within a minute, I was laughing out loud. When a camp AF Dracula made his entrance through a Stars in Your Eyes haze, the whole theatre was in hysterics.
The scene for Dracula – A Comedy of Terrors was set, and it was covered in gore and laughter. It was garish Gothic from start to finish, replete with visual gags, noise gags, verbal gags; nowhere in the field of human drama has a water spray done so much with so little: graveyard fog, dry ice entrances, North Sea storms were all made real with the fine-mist spray.
Charlie Stemp showed himself the master of the one raised eyebrow; Sebastian Torkia the tyrant of the torturous accent, Safeena Ladha was going down on ships while contemplating the same with meek and mild Estate Agent Jonathan Harker, and James Daly in the title role was lizarding all over the lounge and making almost everyone in the theatre fall for him, which made his designated bloodsucker role that much easier as he left vein-drained bodies all over Whitby.
But my favourite was Dianne Pilkington doubling-up as Doctor Westfeldt and her beetle-eating patient Renfield, making her the Number One in quick costume changes. Towards the denouement, her conversions were receiving rousing cheers for their hilarity and inventiveness.
This version by Steve Rosen and Gordon Greenberg(who directs this production superbly, dragging out laughs from every way possible) is loosely based on Bram Stoker’s book. Very loosely. Most of our time is spent in a mental asylum in Whitby, which affords more humour than the Count’s no-fun, one-way-ticket-to-Dead castle.
The way each character is portrayed is fantastic: Harker is the Q in LGBTQ, Mina is man-hungry, Dracula does not wear capes to swish for nothing, and Pilkington confirms the old cliché of psychiatrists becoming as mad as their patients. It is farce, it is panto, it is everything you want it to be for a night of matchless comedy. This is a Dracula I’d die for.
I couldn’t see a connection with the opening music. Perhaps the cheesey hip-hop was Transylvanian…
Menier Chocolate Factory, 4 O’Meara Street, London, SE1 1TE until 3rd May. Times: Tue – Sat 7:30pm | Sat & Sun 3pm. Tickets: £35 – £49.50.
Booking and full details: https://www.menierchocolatefactory.com/tickets/
