November 30, 2008
I am told that this project took 6 months from idea to fruition, the adaptation of the 1897 novel having been written by three of the "crew". Alas, I felt the play retained too many traces of its novelistic origins to convince as staged drama, with frequent prolonged rhetorical outbursts, delivered in a sort of hysterical mumble from the madman Renfield, and much desultory chin-stroking pondering from the doctors in search of a diagnosis.
I only jumped once when the coffin fell open with a satisfying clack, and not a single scream from the audience was heard, surely one test of a good production of Dracula. And the best scene in the novel when Harker sees the Count crawling face downwards like a giant bat along the stone wall of his castle was inexplicably omitted altogether.
Count Dracula (Tom Hathaway) appeared at the start more butler at Waddesdon Manor than sinister host, but he warmed to the part in the second half, if I can put it like that. Saattvic as Prof van Helsing cut an authorative figure but never really developed beyond statuesqueness. But the two stars were the make-up artist, the delightfully-named Emma-Lucy Pinchbeck, whose liberal use of her blood-and-gore budget belied her name and pleased the eye, and Mansfield Chapel itself whose late Victorian interior, perfectly in tune with the era and content of the play, and nicely lit by Mike Bedington, was a great backdrop.
Reverend Productions' next show will be worth looking out for, though the Director James O'Neill would do well to rewrite his supplied profile since the one here was the silliest I've yet seen in an Oxford student programme; and the competition is quite fierce.
I only jumped once when the coffin fell open with a satisfying clack, and not a single scream from the audience was heard, surely one test of a good production of Dracula. And the best scene in the novel when Harker sees the Count crawling face downwards like a giant bat along the stone wall of his castle was inexplicably omitted altogether.
Count Dracula (Tom Hathaway) appeared at the start more butler at Waddesdon Manor than sinister host, but he warmed to the part in the second half, if I can put it like that. Saattvic as Prof van Helsing cut an authorative figure but never really developed beyond statuesqueness. But the two stars were the make-up artist, the delightfully-named Emma-Lucy Pinchbeck, whose liberal use of her blood-and-gore budget belied her name and pleased the eye, and Mansfield Chapel itself whose late Victorian interior, perfectly in tune with the era and content of the play, and nicely lit by Mike Bedington, was a great backdrop.
Reverend Productions' next show will be worth looking out for, though the Director James O'Neill would do well to rewrite his supplied profile since the one here was the silliest I've yet seen in an Oxford student programme; and the competition is quite fierce.