Telegraph
4 stars out of 5
Dracula: Mina’s Reckoning – this feminist take on Bram Stoker has real bite
With a cast comprised entirely of female and non-binary actors, and some super stagecraft, this new adaptation is a resounding success ByMark Brown
In his magnum opus Dracula, Bram Stoker established a myth so potent, and so multifaceted, that it has, over its 126 years, seemed to be endlessly adaptable. Few versions, however, can have been as distinctive as Morna Pearson’s Dracula: Mina’s Reckoning.
Created for the National Theatre of Scotland and Aberdeen Performing Arts, in association with the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, the play begins and ends in the North East of Scotland. At the outset, we see Mina Harker, née Murray (played with convincing intellectual and spiritual restlessness by Danielle Jam) banging on the doors of the Aberdeen Asylum for Women.
It is there that Mina unfolds to the unfortunate inmates her story of vampirism. Speaking in a Scots-English that is inflected with the lovely Doric dialect, she tells the familiar tale from a very different perspective.
Director Sally Cookson’s cast is comprised entirely of female and non-binary actors. With the exception of Dracula’s devotee Renfield (who is interned in the Aberdeen asylum and, somewhat ahistorically, given the non-binary pronoun “them”) the characters retain the gender Stoker gave them.
The impact of the considerable amount of cross-gender casting is often startling, not least in the case of Dracula himself, who is played with a fantastic combination of sinister power and bleak wit by the ever superb Liz Kettle. The actor floats around designer Kenneth MacLeod’s tremendous set with the requisite malign authority.
A huge, metal structure that builds up towards the theatre ceiling, the impressive stage design is assisted by excellent lighting and video work that transforms it into an array of diverse locations, from the forests of Transylvania to the rugged Aberdeenshire coast.
Much of the plot will be recognisable to lovers of Stoker’s story, even if Natalie Arle-Toyne’s Van Helsing is more comic in his self-regard than we might expect. Indeed, many of the male characters, not least Maggie Bain’s pompous Dr Seward (here the superintendent of the asylum), speak in a language of unashamed, Victorian misogyny.
Adapting a prose fiction – especially one as complex as Dracula – for the stage is no easy matter. It is testament to the work of the entire creative team that these 130 minutes of theatre achieve such impressive momentum. The piece is also compellingly atmospheric, due in no small measure to the outstanding music and sound.
In the end, Pearson achieves an extraordinary, feminist coup de théâtre. To divulge it, however, would be a crime deserving of a vampiric visitation.