Lunatic

TheatreN16

30 October 2016

1 Star

Theatre N16 is a company for whom I have a great deal of time: I’ve seen several of their productions since they arrived at their new and interesting space at The Bedford in Balham, and have been transported to a series of unusual and surprising locations, to experience things that don’t come my way in everyday life.  Amongst these, the stunning ‘League of Youth’ – a superb modernisation of Ibsen by the gifted polymath writer-director, Whit Hertford – still stands as an example of Fringe theatre at its absolute very best.  When I heard that Hertford’s next project was to be Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’, I was excited.

Inevitably, I went into the large ‘Globe Theatre’ space on the ground floor of the pub complex yesterday with some expectations about what I was about to witness.  Hertford is a hugely intelligent and imaginative theatre-maker and Stoker offers us raw material to work with that has stimulated countless responses.  Anybody who tackles such well-known material cannot avoid the audience arriving with plenty of preconceived ideas, especially when they remind us of this legacy by playing Bauhaus’ ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ at club volume.

The design, by Ben Jacobs, is bold, stark and confrontational: a contemporary, institutional setting, with desk, microphone, reel-to-reel tape recorder, projection screen, and even a low wall of breezeblocks.  So far, so encouraging.  A doctor, or functionary, sits, slumped at the desk, and then two orderlies bring in ‘the patient’, a Mr Renfield (Chris Spyrides), whose loud voice cuts through the quiet, as we begin to hear from his doctor, too: Justin Stayley, whose vocal projection tends towards the diminuendo.

Stoker’s prose reads just about well enough on the page, but it is fairly intractable when spoken aloud.  Most interpretations, therefore, dispense with nearly all of what he writes.  Not so here.  We get what seem to be at any rate screeds of the stuff, moving in its sedate late Victorian way from one high-flown idea to the next – the linguistic and literary polar opposite of what our eyes have to witness: psychiatric patients doped with pills; abuse of vulnerable patients (including rape); blinding white lights, perhaps a reference to CIA torture techniques?  The distance between text and production yawns open like a crevasse, across which it becomes harder and harder for any ideas – let alone feeling of engagement - to stretch.

After about an hour of this, a third ‘character’ appears: when she finally speaks, she is so muted that, even in the second row, it was barely possible to hear a word she said, Sorcha Bannon.  Well, possibly we weren’t meant to be focussing on what was said.  On what, then?  On another very static and relentlessly ‘under-stated’ performance.  But to what purpose?  It was never clear.

In the end, the female friend of the doctor, Nina – sister of the deceased bride-to-be, Lucy - goes to the room of the madman, Renfield, and they have sex.  It is not clear how she gets in; however, the lunatic of the title then disappears.  Doctor Jonathan Harker next lets it be known that he is hearing voices in his head: whereupon his crazed patient returns… naked, and covered in blood.  The girl then also emerges up in the gallery that runs around the space, also naked and smeared in gore.  Renfield attacks Harker, biting him like a vampire would, before fleeing (where to?).  Then we realise that everything merely existed as a phantasy in Harker’s imagination!  And that is that.

There is much here that reminds one of the conventions and habits of German theatre, and I’ve a feeling that the Germans might – as a culture – warm more to this approach that is likely to happen in the UK, but who am I to prejudge the tastes of an audience?  Here it is; people may flood in through the doors, transported into lord knows what fascinating intellectual or emotional contortions as they grapple with its sheer strangeness and perversity.  Sadly, I do not think I am going to be one of them.  I will go back to Wim Wenders’ and Murnau’s ‘Nosferatu’, I will return – time and again – to Paul Morrissey’s ‘Blood for Dracula’.  But I will put this one in the same drawer as Mel Brooks’, ‘Dracula: Dead and Loving It’.

Maybe there’s another, more finished, more engaging work inside this one.  But – having laboured upon it for eight years – I think this really is what Hertford wants to tell us about this subject matter, and so we should just take it for what it is.  Or not.  I still think he’s a great artist, and I look forward to seeing more work of the quality of ‘League of Youth’.  Regretfully, I have to note that I personally didn’t find any work of that quality in this particular offering.

Lunatic is presented by Riot Act Theatre Company in association with TheatreN16.

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