CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Dracula lacks bite
Skirt-whisker: Jessica Webber
[Touring Consortium]
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FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
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SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
Dracula
Alhambra Theatre, Bradford
THERE ought to be plenty for the audience to sink their teeth into with Touring Consortium Theatre’s adaptation of Dracula.
The company has updated Bram Stoker’s gothic classic with a nod to Hammer Horror camp, with solicitor Jonathan Harker being offered blood-like soup upon his arrival in Transylvania and his schoolteacher fiancee Mina complaining of “slight toothache” after falling victim to the Count.
It also draws on female empowerment, with the aristocratic Lucy Westenra (Jessica Webber) recast here as a sexually liberated young woman. Psychiatric hospital patient Renfield (Cheryl Campbell) is somewhat surreally shown giving birth to Dracula and the Count’s brides demonstrate their hunger through an expressive physical-theatre scene.
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