The show seems sure of itself and its offerings, and it should be: the audience is hooked from the beginning.
The week before Halloween is a wonderfully atmospheric time for the Liverpool Playhouse theatre to host Dracula: Mina’s Reckoning, a retelling of Bram Stoker’s Dracula written by Mona Pearson and directed by Sally Cookson. The show, a production of the National Theatre of Scotland and Aberdeen Performing Arts, seems sure of itself and its offerings, and it should be: the audience is hooked from the beginning.
The play opens with the titular Mina banging on the door of a building, asking to be let in. This building is an asylum, where she spends the following 130 minutes recounting her attempts to escape all manner of situations, ranging from the constraints of being a woman in the nineteenth century to the clutches of a relentless vampire.
Kenneth MacLeod’s costumes are muted, and his set static and relatively spare – the stage is all angles and steps and ramps, largely devoid of colour. The mid-stage sign reading ‘The Aberdeen Asylum’ serves as a visual focal point for the story spun around it, as characters and audience alike are transported to the world outside through Mina’s words.
The show is visually and aurally strong, with Aideen Malone’s meticulous lighting moving us effectively from inside to outside and back again. The confines of the asylum are transformed into a variety of settings by way of lighting small parts of the stage so strategically as to render the rest of it temporarily forgotten. The lighting is buoyed by the score (Benji Bower) and video design (Lewis den Hertog), both of which heighten each scene almost cinematically: the opening scene is backed by an unsettling drone not uncommon in horror films, subtly unnerving the audience from the get go; Act 2 opens with a letter reading set to the increasingly noticeable backing track of a heartbeat; walls frequently appear to be drenched in blood.
Aside from the excellent technical effects, the cast is a high point of this show. Those playing multiple roles move smoothly and adeptly between characters, managing the transition between comedy and gravity effortlessly and making complex action sequences look easy. There is no weak link amongst them, nor one syllable wasted: the play’s every line is delivered in strong and commanding voices. The cast’s consistently clear enunciation is key for the play’s use of north-east and Doric dialects, which add another level of immersion.
Danielle Jam is an excellent Mina, with a palpable impatience for the men and society surrounding her. Catriona Faint’s Jonathan provides some appreciated comedic relief, as does Natalie Arle-Toyne’s Van Helsing. Liz Kettle is a formidable Dracula, increasing in intensity with every scene. Her power steadily builds throughout the haunting ship sequence to the end of Act 1, the pivotal moment of which gives the impression of Dracula floating mid-air alongside Mina’s doomed best friend Lucy (played with great energy by Ailsa Davidson), by which point Kettle’s authority is entirely established.
If a theme of the play is empowerment and breaking free of the confines of the patriarchy of the 1800s, Dracula is a figure in equal parts dangerous and alluring to Mina and her peers. Despite vampiric promises of freedom and unlimited possibilities, however, it seems that Mina’s ultimate empowerment comes by way of her friendships: any feelings she has for Jonathan are dwarfed by her love for Lucy, and her commitment to the companions she meets throughout the play is a driving force for her every action – and while this is a wonderfully dark and absorbing show, there’s certainly nothing spooky about that.