Dracula
Dracula
Tramway, Glasgow
Mary Brennan
IN 1931, when Bela Lugosi played Dracula on-screen, women all across America supposedly left their bedroom windows open, in hopes of a midnight tryst with the vampire Count ... and it's this edge of magnetic sexual charisma that Jonathan Goddard affords the role in Mark Bruce's dance-theatre version of the original Bram Stoker tale.
Goddard is the first to take to the half-lit stage, a sleekly black-clad figure, his face and flesh chalk-white with the pallor of the undead - and then, as a flamenco guitar thrums through the space, he dances with a lithe, sinuous grace that suggests the vampire ability to shape-shift, even become spiraling mist.The movement is mesmerising, yet there is an innate, coiled menace in this dance of self assertion by a predator with a (literal) taste for women.
If Goddard's Dracula dominates Bruce's scenario and his choreography, the women characters are, interestingly, as much victims of their own time - Stoker's novel was published in 1897 - as of Dracula's blood lust.
Lucy Westenra (Kristin McGuire) may pout and flirt, a proper little heart-breaker, but she still has no future beyond marriage.
Her orgasmic surrender to Dracula, her limbs slithering over his body in pent-up desire, is a dark reminder of Lucy's restless, unfulfilled spirit in life before her "death".
As for Mina (Eleanor Duval), patiently waiting at home for Jonathan Harker's return from his encounter with Dracula, she is that fascinating enigma, a survivor.
We see her senses erotically awakened by Dracula, her strength and determination destroy him where men have failed.
This central drama is framed by episodes that play on our fascination with guignol horror: the snarling, lickerish arousal of Dracula's blood-craving Brides could be every man's fantasy, but for the fangs, while Bruce's use of grotesque comedy - yes Goddard's Count hoofs it in a soft-shoe shuffle - is a clever lull before another storm of prowling, feral energy is unleashed.
It's a caring, choreographically inventive distillation of Stoker's story.
It's full of brooding visual flair with Goddard leading the dance in a bravura characterisation of an elemental evil as inwardly tortured as it is outwardly deadly.
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