Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors at Menier Chocolate Factory – review

You can take Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel two ways. It can become a horrific story of the undead (see recent Nosferatu), or it can be dressed up as a bit of fun, about a bloke who wears a cloak and bites people’s necks. (See a lot of the Hammer Horror genre).

Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors is decidedly in the second camp, pun is absolutely intended. This is Dracula reimagined as a queer odyssey where both men and women are attracted to the blood-sucking Count.

It begins when Jonathan Harker (played with wide-eyed neurosis by Charlie Stemp), reimagined as an English estate agent with a germ phobia, is sent to Transylvania to do a property deal with a new client called Dracula. When Dracula (a preening James Daly) first appears in a flash of brilliant light, he is wearing a lace vest and leather trousers and showing off his abs. The tone is set at that point, even as the story winds back to Whitby where the cast of five sink their teeth with abandon into many parts.

The show arrives in the UK with gleaming off-Broadway credentials. Director and co-writer Gordon Greenberg is an experienced US hand (he previously directed The Baker’s Wife at the Menier) while his co-writer Steve Rosen also worked with him on the book for The Secret of My Success. It is slick and knowing, and in some ways surprisingly faithful to the 1897 novel; it keeps, for example, the idea of letters that communicate the plot. It also suggests that Harker’s love for his fiancée Lucy (a feisty Safeena Ladha) is deepened by their adventure, saving her neck from the Count’s fangs.

But in most respects, it throws caution and respect to the wind and concentrates on just having a very good time. On Tijana Bjelajac’s set, with Gothic doors framed by batwings that light up at dramatic moments, bad puns and weak jokes take flight. Daly, reprising his role from the States, turns up to a party bearing gluten-free cakes, baked according to a recipe given to him by Marie Antoinette’s pastry chef “before he lost his head”.

Sebastien Torkia dresses up as both the over-sexed Mina, Lucy’s less attractive sister (“A lovely young girl? Are we still talking about Mina?”) and as a female Van Helsing, complete with dirndl skirt and too-heavy bosom. Dianne Pilkington morphs effortlessly from Lucy’s misogynist father to the insect-eating Renfield, sloping along the side of the stage in a white wig.

A lot of the humour arises from the cast’s sheer glee at their lightning-quick changes of costume and character, their pleasure at the sheer preposterousness of it all. Their timing is excellent, their delivery ironic. It’s all very silly, you might even say totally batty. But gently enjoyable all the same.