Stoker’s Dracula… and Others
Dracula, or “How’s Your Blood, Count?” by Micky O’Donoughue & Johnny Hanraham
Norwich Theatre Royal, 1996
The fact that Dracula is one of the most popular horror icons of the 20th century is mainly due to the novel of that name published in 1897 by the Gothic fantasist and sometime theatre manager, Bram Stoker (1847–1912). However, only Frankenstein (or rather, the monster created by the fictional doctor of that name in Mary Shelley’s novel of 1816) has been more frequently misrepresented or more thoroughly traduced by succeeding generations of sensation-seekers.
Stoker based his novel in part on the legend of Vlad the Impaler, Prince of Walachia, who lived in the 15th century. He became notorious for his cruel and sadistic treatment of Ottoman enemies and Rumanian subjects alike as his preferred method of torture was to impale the living bodies of his prisoners on tall spikes with weights tied to their limbs so that gravity would slowly skewer them to their deaths. The son of a man of equally bloodthirsty habits, who had earned himself the nickname Vlad Dracul, or Vlad the Devil, Vlad Junior therefore became known by the epithet Dracula, or Son of the Devil.
Gruesome as these practices were, they do not play a large part in Stoker’s tale. Perhaps the author was simply intrigued by the eerie sound of Dracula’s name. But he certainly drew on other legends from Slavic folklore to increase the horror of the story. Vampires, or the undead, were common nightmare figures in the late Middle Ages. They were said to be the spirits of evildoers who left their graves at night to go in search of fresh blood which they stole from the necks of their victims, thereby turning them into vampires too. Fortunately for the living, vampires’ activities were limited by various factors (and as the legend spread so did the variety of ways in which they could be defeated, both in order to comfort the frightened and, no doubt, give the storytellers more opportunity for invention and originality). Vampires were unable to cross running water, for example, and they needed to be back in their boxes by dawn. They reacted badly to the sight of a cross, garlic and sunlight, caused no reflection in a mirror, and the only sure way to destroy one was either to cut its head off or drive a stake through its heart.
The root of the legend can probably be traced to the fact that outcasts from a village would often take to living in graveyards on the edge of the community, possibly in the lee of the local noble’s family vault. Emerging to forage or steal food only at night, when the possibility of being seen would be so much the less, their shadowy figures glimpsed by moonlight would easily play on the superstitious minds of the ill-educated peasantry. As for whether the historical Dracula also drank the blood of his victims as Stoker’s evil count does, is not recorded. But there is at least one authenticated case of an aristocrat indulging in a similar vice. The Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Báthory used to bathe in human blood, believing it would keep her skin looking young – a particularly repellent variation on the ass’s milk theory. She filled her dungeons with peasant girls to ensure a continuous supply, and when she was finally rumbled and arrested in 1610, the bodies of over fifty young women were discovered in her castle. Her story became the inspiration for the 1970 Hammer film Countess Dracula starring the statuesque Ingrid Pitt. [See Sex in the Cinema.]
Fifty years before, FW Murnau had made the first of the many spin-off films from the book (around 140 at the last count), with the appropriately named Max Schreck as the silent and evil Nosferatu. (‘Schreck’, meaning fright in German, was the pseudonym of the respected actor Alfred Abel.) Murnau had in fact been unable to obtain the rights to the novel, but had gone ahead regardless with his own adaptation, simply changing the title. Stoker’s widow sued but by the time she had won the case, the German production company had gone bankrupt.
In 1925 a friend of Stoker’s, Hamilton Deane, adapted the book for the stage and this version ran on and off for the next sixteen years. It was in a hammy adaptation of this part that authentic Hungarian Bela Lugosi made his name in Universal’s 1931 film, having already created the role on Broadway four years before. In true Hollywood style, one of the major differences in the film was when the Transylvanian count comes to England he settles not in Whitby but in London, probably because few if any of the studio executives at Universal had ever heard of Yorkshire, let alone one of its most venerable resorts. Still, seeing a market for the movie in Europe, they rushed out a Spanish-language version filmed on the same sets immediately the American film had finished shooting.
Lugosi, of course, identified with the role for the rest of his life and, as per his dying wish, was even buried in the count’s unholy cloak in 1955. In the fifties, Hammer Studios in England created their own long-running series of films based on the character, starring Christopher Lee. Over a dozen outings, he never managed to outwit Peter Cushing’s ever-vigilant Professor Van Helsing, while in 1979 it was another German, Werner Herzog, who managed to drain most of the horror out of the story by turning it all intellectual. In Klaus Kinski’s portrayal, the count’s need for blood is more of a disease than any malign compulsion, which effectively dissipates much of the character’s ghoulish fascination. “Oh, so he’s not evil, he’s just ill. Bo-ring.”
As so often with the maverick Herzog’s films, the story behind the making of the movie is almost more interesting than what actually made it onto celluloid. For Fitzcarraldo he had hauled a steam ship over a South American mountain to lend authenticity to the tale of a mad Irishman hauling a steam ship over a mountain to bring grand opera to the natives. In Nosferatu the Vampire, a frequently shot-for-shot remake of Murnau’s silent classic, he wanted to film the release of eleven thousand grey rats into the streets of Delft. (He could only get white rats so the crew had to paint them grey.) The Burgomeister refused, not least because the city fathers had only just finished clearing an infestation of home-grown vermin from the town’s canals. The director was forced to film the scene on a smaller scale in neighbouring Schiedam. Twentieth Century Fox, part backers of the movie, also stuck their oar in by insisting Herzog shoot in English rather than German, which happened to be the first language of the cast and crew. The results were so hilarious that for general release Fox were forced to issue a subtitled German version which, even by art house standards, had longueurs of epic proportions. It wasn’t until the mid-eighties that the television version with Louis Jourdain managed to recapture something of the essence of the original story in the authentic locations.
On stage, Dracula has bared his plastic fangs to great effect since that original twenties outing, and has been played by a variety of actors including, in recent years, Daniel Day-Lewis, Terence Stamp, George Chakiris and Frank Langella. Christopher Bond produced his own version of the legend in a successful horror-comedy play in the seventies, and some theatres showing it had the happy thought of providing a programme which could be folded in such a way as to form a cross. Tonight’s programme, alas, will not do this – though if you roll it up really tight and sharpen one end, it will make a token stake, just in case you begin to get the jitters. Either that, or you could always use it to swat the odd bat…
PS
Occasionally you don’t need reference books. In the early eighties, a horror-comedy version of Dracula played the Little Theatre in Bristol, and the description of the programme which folded into the shape of a cross came from that. They were single sheets of paper, of course, with instructions on how to carry out the origami printed on them below the list of the actors. One of those actors was the sainted Method master himself, Daniel Day-Lewis.
This was before all the cinema fame, of course, and maybe even before the TV commercial for (I think) the Sunday Times in which the young actor appears as Hamlet holding Yorick’s skull. The gravedigger suddenly yells “On me ’ead, son,” and there’s a bicycle kick and over-the-top goal celebrations and it’s all very subversive and funny. But I also think it reflects well on the actor who, on occasion, has received some criticism – not least from me – for his overly immersive methods, and there was a whole hoo-ha over his genuine stage Hamlet in 1989, when he is said to have walked off mid-performance having ‘seen’ the ghost of his own dead father. He has since claimed he was speaking more metaphorically than literally, but that reputation for weirdness, or call it intensity, rightly or wrongly, stuck. Whether this was an extreme example of his engagement with a role, or merely spiteful exaggeration of his comments which got out of hand, you can’t deny that whatever techniques he uses to achieve his performances are pretty effective: three Best Actor Oscars, four BAFTAs, Golden Globes and SAGs by the bucketload to name but a few, not to mention a relationship with the fabulously French Isabelle Adjani and his current marriage to Arthur Miller’s daughter Rebecca. Good for him, I say. I’d stand him a beer – though having said that, he looks the sort who doesn’t drink, and since I don’t either, that would probably be one of the more quiet evenings down the Sock and Bucket…
The other reason I remember this production, of course, is because the Little Theatre is also where I did a lot of my amateur acting later that very decade, and it’s still a thrill to recall how I once, however briefly, trod the same boards as such luminaries as not only Sir Daniel but also the likes of Felicity Kendall, Michael Hordern, Peter Capaldi, and that Roy Cropper off Coronation Steet. (The bathos is for comic effect, and it would be wrong of me not to give my fellow thesp, the marvellous David Nielsen, his due. I saw him in Mike Stott’s notorious Funny Peculiar there, and that even included a nude scene which, I’m telling you now, would have shocked Hayley Cropper’s twinset off.)