Tickets for Dracula: Blood Is Life, Ewing Entertainment Worldwide's debut stage play in Thailand, start at 1,200 baht and we simply may never agree on whether the show is worth the price. What we will agree on, however, is that Chulachak "Hugo" Chakrabongse, starring as Count Dracula, is a good-looking man. Women love him and so do men, straight or gay.
First things first, the show is not "oh wow" brilliant, but it's not bad, either. An evening spent at the Pic-Ganesha Theatre is good fun. Are we going to see anything "new" in this as a theatrical piece? That naturally just depends on how much you have seen. In any case, credit must be given to Ewing Entertainment Worldwide, for nothing is as laudable and reckless as investing in the arts in Thailand on such a tremendous scale and for that we are thankful for. There have been too many big commercial shows which weren't rewarding and those good small-scale ones which hardly made any money and hopefully Blood Is Life and the likes in future can bridge these two ends of the spectrum.
There's hardly any need to go over the plot of Bram Stoker's 1897 classic Gothic horror, to which this stage play version, directed by Joe Harmston, follows faithfully. The Count needs new blood to spread the undead curse and so he moves from Transylvania to England. Dear Lucy (Myra Molloy) has fallen prey, then it's a battle between a small group of men and women -- the Dutch doctor Van Helsing, Lucy's suitor Dr John Seward, solicitor Jonathan Harker, Lucy's bestie and later Dracula's prey Mina -- and the bloodthirsty Count. We know it's garlic, mirror and finally the Bowie knife that does the trick. The universality of the story and the fact that people already know and love it, in a way, already makes up half of the show's success and the rest is up to the production.
For Blood Is Life, the brilliance of the script by Steven Dietz is worth acknowledging; the production's pace does not make you drowsy or want to sleep; the dialogue is a nice mix of the conversational and the poetic and most importantly, it has retained a nice portion of the epistolary narrative used in Stoker's novel that we have grown to love. What's left for Blood Is Life, therefore, is the execution part, which the play unfortunately failed at. The show, produced by Paul Ewing, aims to be scary and sexy, and we are promised to be excited by the element of magic. As it turns out, it's not that scary or sexy and the magic in question goes no further than flashing lights at the audience, or fuming the stage with smoke and ta-da, the Count disappears!
The stage design by Sean Cavanagh is itself a spectacle as an art installation and it's one of the reasons why the show is worth seeing. With the trick of perspective -- the sloping from front stage area to the back and the trapezoid-shaped bed -- we enjoy a dimensional sense of space from wherever we sit in the theatre. The sombre and distorted structures for changing scenes on wheels are deceptively simple; there are just a few main pieces but somehow we constantly feel transported to different places: the Count's castle, Lucy's bedroom, the sanatorium and the cemetery at Dracula's hometown, etc.
For the most part, the energy for the play depends on Van Helsing (Joe Dixon), Seward (Christopher Brand), Harker (Vin Kridaorn), all of whom have done an excellent job. But from Myra Molloy, playing Lucy and Maxi Bauer, playing Mina, we need more of a distinction in terms of voice tones and physical expressions, as they go from being sensual at the beginning, to being scared and confused and later to be completely possessed.
Ironically, we realise how good Hugo is as Dracula when comparing him to guest star William Belchambers who played the Count in place of Hugo for the first three nights. We learn that for the one who's playing Dracula, the looks of the actor are just as important as how well he acts. Unlike Belchambers, Hugo's got all the necessary charm and charisma needed to simultaneously captivate and frighten the audience from the start. The success of Hugo, who never did a stage play before, as Dracula, comes from three factors: his looks, his confidence on stage and the fact that he doesn't have to speak much in the play.
Aside from the stage design, Paul Ewing's take on the character of Renfield, the lunatic at Dr John Seward's asylum, is another reason why the show is worth seeing. All the important elements in the play -- humour, tension, the horror and, most importantly, the philosophical pondering on the idea of vampirism -- are single-handedly delivered by him as he goes on from the delusional to the repentant.
Although Blood Is Life is not as scary or sexy as we would have hoped, nonetheless, with characters like Renfield, the ancient tale of Dracula yet again seems relevant to the contemporary world. We don't just think of Dracula as this guy who drinks blood and is immortal. The show talks about the sexuality, youth, death and immortality that all of us humans think about or desire from time to time and will continue to do so. Blood Is Life is not perfect but the essential message has been delivered.
Dracula: Blood Is Life
A scene from Dracula: Blood Is Life.
