strange_complex | Gothmas 2019: Dracula by the Northern Ballet

lady_lugosi1313 and I booked our tickets for the Northern Ballet's Dracula some six months before the actual performance, because we had both enjoyed it so much when they last did it in 2014 (LJ / DW).

I wrote in my previous review about what a brilliant medium ballet is for telling the story of Dracula in, but it bears repeating. The capacity which the performers have for conveying the supernatural strength and abilities of the vampire characters is just breath-taking, and they really rose to the challenge it offered them to push the medium to its limits. Seeing what they can do live on stage in front of your eyes is an experience not to be missed, and I found that on this second viewing I was looking out for and anticipating what I knew would be some of the most impressive moments - especially Dracula crawling face-down from his window. On one level, you know that this is largely a case of a very steeply-sloping (not actually vertical) frame with bars and grips in just the right places - but on another the performer's strength and agility turns it into an absolutely believable illusion, and besides I sure as hell couldn't do it, frame or no frame.

But it's not just about physical strength and agility. It's also that the story has to be conveyed wholly without words and through body-language, and that opens up the potential for an impressionistic form of story-telling with multiple possible interpretations, as well as putting huge emphasis on the degrees and forms of the psychological relationships between the characters - domination, love, longing, subservience etc. Dracula can exert his supernatural influence over other characters via gestures or direct manipulation, without them seeming to be aware of the fact. Characters with an emotional bond can mirror each other's body language or appear in each other's thoughts by being on stage but at a distance or unseen. And emotional states can be conveyed via the manner of movement, like a very effective slow-motion scene when Van Helsing, Seward and Godalming find Lucy yet again unconscious and spread-eagled across the bed, try to treat her, finally realise that it is too late this time and depart, closing her eyes as they go.

Both ballet as a medium and Dracula as a story are also of course dripping with erotic potential. As I mentioned in my review of the 2014 performance, this version includes a profoundly homoerotic duet between Dracula and Jonathan early on in his castle, in which Dracula gently guides Jonathan's movements and lifts and grasps him, almost face to groin. I don't think I'd noticed last time, though, that what finally tips Dracula over the edge from wanting to bite Jonathan and stopping himself to actually doing it was finding him embroiled in another very erotic dance with the three brides. Then, Dracula, inflamed perhaps with anger, perhaps jealousy, perhaps a mixture of both, finally goes in for the bite.

His predation on both Lucy and Mina is played as an irresistible romance, too, culminating in the incredible pas de deux between Dracula and Mina. The music for this is Spiegel im Spiegel by Arvo Pärt, which you will almost certainly know. It is quite often used in film and on TV over shots of misty, early-morning fields, conveying feelings of loss, longing and the beauty of nature, and it goes on for a good ten minutes. For the full duration of that time we watch Dracula and Mina's bodies responding to one another in an all-consuming passion which we know is self-destructive for both of them. At the beginning she is half-distraught and he tries to hold himself back as he had earlier with Jonathan - yet she also urges him on, pulling him towards her. Time stands still, until nothing matters but their absorption into one another. It is the absolute highlight of the ballet.

Meanwhile, set against Dracula's attentions, the band of human men (Van Helsing, Seward, Jonathan and Godalming) are just constantly getting in the way of the women's fun - stopping Lucy from being a great big vamp when she arrives at her engagement party on Dracula's arm, breaking up Mina and Dracula's night of passion, etc. I remember them coming to annoy me over the course of the production last time I saw it, with their self-important leaping about the stage, and the same happened this time. The angle of the story here seems very much to be that the women are constrained by their male human counterparts, and that Dracula is an agent of liberation for them, in much the same way as is clear from their responses to him in Hammer's Dracula (1958). Certainly, Dracula himself is given a strongly sympathetic element, rooted in the way he keeps trying to hold himself back from biting both Jonathan and later Mina.

The choreography, costumes and stage sets were largely along the same lines as I remember from last time, but with some differences. One of the main ones was that there were two different Draculas this time: an 'older' one at the beginning, wearing a Nosferatu-esque bald cap and huge Gary Oldmanish red collar, who then transformed into a 'younger' one with slicked-back hair and a huge black velvet cloak after he had drunk Jonathan's blood and was ready to begin his journey to England. Not having bothered to buy a programme, I had no idea this was coming, and let out an Actual Gasp at the moment of transformation - partly because it was cleverly done, making use of a shadowy space towards the back of the stage and the obfuscating qualities of the big velvet cloak to substitute one for the other, but also because it was accompanied by a distinctly Hammeresque musical sting, which I took to indicate the kind of Dracula who was now standing before us. (A falling minor arpeggio over six notes, which I'm certain I recognise and would love to link to, but can't seem to track down right now.)

I should say that the dancer who performed 'old Dracula' was extremely good, and that it was he who did both the near-vertical crawl from the window and the duet with Jonathan. But all the same I was glad of the change to the 'younger' version, as the bald-cap was a bit obvious and he'd perhaps been directed to do a little too much going to bite Jonathan and recoiling with self-loathing, so that it began to seem slightly silly and comic after a while. The younger version, meanwhile, had a much better velvet cloak than the rather cheap-looking one we'd complained about last time - and we both agreed that we wouldn't kick him out of bed for eating biscuits, either. Meanwhile, I'm pretty sure the brides were all in white last time, but this time each one had her own bright signature colour, while they remained distinct as a trio by having similar hair and costume designs - all in a somewhat Japanese-looking style, which worked well given the Japanese traditions of supernatural monsters and both Noh and Kabuki theatre with their dance, gestures and music.

I'm not sure I wholly remember how the version we saw last time ended, and I don't seem to have mentioned it in my review, but anyway this time Dracula and Mina fled together to his castle, pursued by the men. There, things moved in a Hammerish direction again, as they were trying to climb up into the castle when the sun rose and Dracula was killed by the daylight - done via another clever transformation scene, where he had his back to us and his cloak wrapped protectively around Mina, and simply melted away down into the cloak, leaving only Mina behind. The men cavort triumphantly, but she finds a dagger on the ground and slashes her own neck, ending the story. That was another Gasp! moment for me, as I've argued in the recent paper I've written about Classical references in Dracula that his predation on Mina is to some extent a parallel for Tarquin's rape of Lucretia, and Lucretia too takes her own life with a dagger. It's not actually the same, because Lucretia does it as a response to rape, whereas Mina here seems to have done it more out of grief at losing Dracula. But because ballet is wordless and thus very open to interpretation, you could also read it as her coming to her normal senses when Dracula dies and his spell over her is broken, and thus killing herself out of similar feelings to Lucretia's. Anyway, it was certainly an ending I can't remember seeing before, with a lot of food for thought in it.

Now that I have seen this version of Dracula for a second time, it's confirmed the provisional opinion I had of it beforehand - that it is the second best adaptation of Dracula I've ever seen, with only Hammer's cycle of Dracula films above it. As regular readers will realise, I have seen a lot of Dracula adaptations, and Hammer's will always remain the ultimate interpretations to me - so that's the highest praise I can possibly give. This time, the performance we saw was filmed and transmitted live to various cinemas around the country, and I am really hope that also means it might be made available on DVD at some point, as I would love so much to be able to watch it again. And, since the casts changed from performance to performance during its run, I will record here that ours was as follows:

Dracula: Javier Torres
Old Dracula: Riku Ito
Mina: Abigail Prudames
Lucy: Antoinette Brooks-Daw
Jonathan: Lorenzo Trossello
Renfield: Kevin Poeung
Dr Van Helsing: Ashley Dixon
Dr Seward: Joseph Taylor
Arthur: Matthew Koon
The Brides: Rachael Gillespie, Sarah Chun and Minju Kang

Well done and thank you so much to all of them!