In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

I went to see The Woman in Black with Joel last night at the Grand Opera House in York, and since I've written about it at some length on Facebook, I may as well transfer that over here too.

My first encounter with this story was reading the script of the play what must be almost 25 years ago now, and I've wanted to see an actual production of it ever since. All the more so after watching the classic 1989 ITV adaptation of it last week by way of preparation. In fact, that worked even better than expected, as the stage play begins after the action of the story has ended, with the protagonist (Arthur Kipps) asking a young actor to help him tell the story. So it was quite easy to imagine the Kipps of the ITV version going on to be the Kipps of this stage production, some decades later.

We had seats a looooonng way up in the gods, because I only found out it was even on late in the day when there weren't many tickets left. At York's Grand Opera House, that meant very steeply-raked rows with terrible leg-room, so we probably didn't see it to its absolute best effect. Nevertheless, it delivered some really effective chills for a theatre production. Joel's hand got a good squeezing at certain points! Very good use made of a beating-heart sound effect, some sudden plunges into darkness, projected silhouettes etc. Also nice creative work with a small selection of basic props which 'became' a myriad of different things during the course of the play - especially a large wicker trunk which served as back-stage storage, a desk, a train carriage seat, a horse-drawn trap, a bed, and Alice Drablow's document repository.

One of the things I really liked when I read the script was the double-layered approach the story. It begins with Kipps and the actor he has hired discussed how to tell his story, and beginning some read-throughs, after which they 'go into' the story itself, 'becoming' the various characters within it but also periodically coming back 'out' of the narrative to comment further on matters of stage production. During this process, a Woman in Black appears at the appropriate moments in the story, but she isn't played by either of them, and the implication of course is that she isn't merely 'in' the story but is actually manifesting in the empty theatre they're using, with ghastly implications for them - and perhaps even for us, the real-world audience.

It's a very clever device, not merely 'meta' for the sake of it, but adding a layer of thrill and ambiguity around where the line lies between reality and imagination. It worked well in this production - though I think I'd have had the Woman standing silently somewhere within the actual auditorium at a couple of points for that extra blurring of realities. However, some business at the beginning around the protagonist not being a natural performer was slightly over-egged, and played for laughs in a way that then set the audience up to respond to some of the later chills with self-conscious laughter that I'm not sure added to the experience.

One thing I hadn't remembered was that once Kipps and his hired actor get into the story, it begins on Christmas Eve with Kipps' family telling ghost stories around the fire - way to acknowledge the grand tradition within which your ghost story belongs! I also had fun turning up in all-black Victoriana, just for the lulz. We intended to take a picture next to one of the posters for the play, but there wasn't really room amongst the crowds coming out at the end. However, one woman spontaneously complimented me on my outfit, clearly understanding exactly what I'd done, so it was all worthwhile!

The production we saw is touring all over the UK and Ireland, so if you live in one of those countries, you have ample opportunity to catch it yourselves if you are interested!

Two weeks ago, I attended IVFAF, a vampire festival combining an academic conference, a creative congress (i.e. authors talking about their work), a film festival, a number of theatrical performances, a Bram Stoker walk, a cabaret and a ball all into one glorious five-day event. I've been following their activities on Twitter / FB for a while, but their last three events had been in Romania and at times of year when I already had a lot on. This one, though, came to the Highgate area of London, and I decided it was worth devoting a week of summer holiday time to going along.

Back in April, I went to a different two-day conference marking the bicentenary of John Polidori's 'The Vampyre', which also took place in Highgate (though at a different main venue). I never wrote it up here, though I did upload an album of pictures intending to use them as the basis for a never-written entry, mainly of our visit to Highgate cemetery complete with a few screencaps from Taste the Blood of Dracula, which used it as a location. I went along to that conference purely out of interest as a listener, but by the end of it I'd realised that specialists in Gothic literature aren't always in the best position to unpick 'The Vampyre's engagement with Classical antiquity, and indeed that that engagement was considerably deeper and richer than I'd previously realised.

IVFAF 2019 also took the bicentenary of 'The Vampyre' as one of its themes (along with the Highgate Vampire craze and Hammer's vampire films), and I registered for it from my academic email address, which prompted the organiser to ask whether I was planning to offer a paper. Fresh from the recent Polidori conference, I said yes, I probably would, and indeed re-read both Polidori's story and Byron's related Fragment and made some notes on them. But then as the abstract deadline drew closer I looked more soberly at the other tasks I had to do during the same period, and realised that it probably wouldn't actually be a very good idea, so I didn't submit one. I decided I would just go along in the same spirit as I had to the Polidori conference, to enjoy other people's papers and the films, shows, walks and partying around them. Except that then, about three weeks before the conference, I got another slightly plaintive note from the organiser saying that he was holding a slot for me on the programme, and could I send in my abstract? And it turned out I couldn't resist this, so I had yet another look at my calendar, identified three days I could claw out to write the paper after all, and knocked an abstract together. So that is how I turned what was supposed to be a week's holiday into three days of intensive paper preparation followed by travelling down to London and delivering it.

It was fine, though. I had been right in the first place that there was a good paper's worth of things to say about how both Byron and Polidori's stories engaged with Classical antiquity, was able to compile it into a perfectly respectable paper in three days, and indeed managed to identify some quite specific source material for each of them which I don't think has been fully explored before. So it was all in the bag by the end of the Monday, leaving plenty of time for me to relax, travel down to London and settle into my aparthotel on the Tuesday. I even found time that evening (equipped with advice from a few FB friends) to get my nails done in suitably vampiric style in a local nail bar, ready for the week ahead.


My paper was scheduled for the first day, which was nice as it meant I could get the worky bit over and done with and then enjoy the rest of the festival. I made sure to attire myself appropriately, and ( did my thing )

The ( other papers were good to listen to too )

I didn't spend so much time in the creative congress, which was largely scheduled in parallel with the academic conference, but I mean you might as well sit and listen to Kim Newman being interview by Stephen Jones (editor of The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories in which Kim's first Anno Dracula story appeared) if you've got no other pressing commitments.


The Bram Stoker walk ( was another highlight )

DracSoc chair Julia also attended the academic conference, while additional members Adrian and Pat joined us at various points in the evenings for dinners, shows and films. We saw two productions by the Don't Go In The Cellar theatre company: 'Sherlock Holmes versus The Sussex Vampire' (which also included versions of The Creeping Man and The Devil's Foot) and 'Dracula's Ghost', in which a very pale-faced lawyer named Mr Leech (whose true identity I'm sure you can guess) periodically visits the widowed Mrs Bram Stoker, interspersed with relating the story of his life. The first was done as a one-man show (as are most DGITC productions), with the audience cast as criminals in Sherlock's memory palace, and worked pretty well, but we felt that Sherlock as a character did struggle a bit without other characters to be clever at. The second was an absolute cracker, though. The inclusion of a second actor on stage playing Mrs Stoker probably helped, but it was basically a whirlwind tour through more or less every possible vampire and Dracula-related story you can think of, all incorporated into and referenced within Mr Leech's life story. My favourite moments were a mention of D.D. Denham (Dracula's alias in The Satanic Rites of Dracula) and a scene in which he meets and speaks with Kali - partly because this references one of the very unmade Hammer Dracula films we'd heard Kieran talking about the previous day, but also because it was just done so effectively, by the actor who'd also been playing Mrs Stoker putting masks on both her face and the back of her head, and undulating her arms in a very divine and otherworldly manner.

I didn't make it to any of the new shorts and feature films which were screened during the days, again because of clashes with the academic conference and Stoker walk, but I did get to ( three evening showings of vampire classics )

Finally (though not chronologically as it took place on the Friday - but the grand climax of the festival anyway), there was the ( combined cabaret night and ball at the Birdcage in Camden, some of which was NSFW )

Plans are afoot already for next year's IVFAF, quite possibly to be in Santa Cruz with a Lost Boys theme. I'm not sure I'll make that, but having the chance to go this year was definitely a good thing, and now I even have another Classical vampires paper to maybe think about writing up properly some time soon. Dracula first, though...

I spent this evening at the Seven Arts theatre space in Chapel Allerton, where lady_lugosi1313 had spotted that Spud Theatre were doing a production of Carmilla. We saw the same company do Dracula a few years ago (LJ / DW), and thought it was pretty decent for a local amateur production - certainly decent enough for us to be willing to try another of their shows. And we were right to do so, both coming out saying that we felt it had been better than the Dracula they'd done previously.


Carmilla is a first-person story, told by a 19-year-old girl named Laura, and the way this production approached that was to have her character facing the audience directly and telling her story to them, punctuated by other actors entering and merging into scenes with her when she begins describing what other people said and did - at which points she turns and interacts with them instead. This worked really well, and (as I've confirmed by a quick glance at my copy of the story since I got home) meant that they could use masses of the original text verbatim. Of course, it did mean that the young woman playing Laura in particular had a lot of lines of crisp, eloquent mid-19th century prose to learn, and indeed almost every member of the cast had at least some quite long speeches to get through without the benefit of the prompts and cues that come with rapid-fire back-and-forth dialogue. So there were inevitably one or two muddles or hesitations - but remarkably few of them considering how much they had to say and that (as far as I know) it was their first performance. Overall, I thought they all spoke beautifully, really doing justice to Le Fanu's prose. The actual performances were impressive, too. Possibly slightly over-egged in a few cases - but that might just be because I'm more used to watching film and TV, where people can be more subtle, multiplied by the fact that we were sitting in the second row, so quite close up to the action. There may also be a case for saying that Carmilla herself was a little too fluttery and bubbly, given that she is also described in the dialogue as 'languid', but then again in and of itself it worked - it was just the slight contradiction with the dialogue which made it seem slightly off-tone for me.

As for the story itself, I don't think I've read it since I was a teenager, and of course it's been creeping steadily up my mental 'to-read' list over the past few months given the other things I've been reading and thinking about. So it was very welcome to have the opportunity to revisit it through this production. And isn't it great? It's certainly thrilling to think that pure Victorian ideals of female friendship allowed Le Fanu to get away with writing something that strikes modern audiences as so rampantly lesbitious. At least, I feel the need to read up on exactly how that worked and how it would have been received by contemporary readers. My current reading of David Skal's biography of Bram Stoker has primed me enough on the Irish cholera epidemics of the 1830s and '40s to see the resonances those must have given to the casting of Carmilla's nocturnal activities as a 'plague'; while of course it's obvious and widely recognised how much Stoker's own vampire novel owes to Le Fanu's. I can also see now how much Robert Aickman's 'Pages from a Young Girl's Journal' (LJ / DW) is drawing on this: particularly in its use of a young female first-person narrator and its device of vampires targeting their victims at balls. His vampire-character is male rather than female, but as I noted in my review, his female narrator does also seem distinctly interested in the contessa's daughter after she (believes she) has begun her transformation into a vampire, so Aickman manages to have it both ways - an opposite-sex main attraction, but also a same-sex sub-plot.

I think I will still revisit the story proper before long, not least to test out whether or not it uses Classical references at all in the same manner as Stoker's Dracula. It won't harm the paper I'm planning on that topic if it doesn't, as John Polidori's 'The Vampyre' and Edgar Allan Poe both certainly do, and we know that both were read by and influenced Stoker. So I've got a strong enough case to say that his Classical allusions are part of the tradition he is positioning himself within already - but another one or two tucked away within Carmilla certainly wouldn't hurt. I can only say for now that there definitely weren't any in this evening's performance - but who knows what there might be in the parts of the text they didn't use.

This I saw on Friday, in company with the lovely ms_siobhan and planet_andy. It takes its cue from the 1922 film Nosferatu, but it certainly isn't a straightforward adaptation of it. Rather, it is set entirely on board the ship carrying Count Orlok from Varna to Whitby, and follows the experiences of three surviving ship-mates (one fervently religious, one superstitious, one harshly rationalistic) as they are driven to terrible thoughts and deeds by their dread cargo in a single dark hour before the coming of the dawn.

Those ship-board scenes, of course, are also in Stoker's novel, not to mention many other versions of Dracula. Indeed, this stage play began with the captain scribbling furiously in his log, narrating entries in a broadly Stokerish style (and a beautiful Irish accent, no less!) as he brought it up to date. But what ties it specifically to Nosferatu (1922) is the visual style - partly the set and props, but above all Count Orlok himself. This is in spite of the fact that we never actually see him. Rather, the story is driven by his terrible presence down below in the hold, and after the captain of the ship finally climbs down to investigate what is there, and we hear a scream and see the slap of a single bloody hand on the (translucent) cabin door, he begins to take on the mannerisms and clothing of the count. Even then, it's slightly too simple to say that he becomes possessed by Orlok's evil. There is something much more complex going on about the effects of fear and isolation on the human mind. But his hands increasingly become Orlok's clawed hands, and he abandons the long duster-coat he had been wearing to reveal that Orlok's buttoned jacket had been there all along, just underneath.

This is a perfectly solid set-up, and there are plenty of things about the play I enjoyed. I particularly liked the lady who sat throughout the performance on one side of the stage with a cello and a microphone, providing siren-like singing and eerie music when required. There was also some clever trickery which allowed ship-mates who had just died to be discovered already wrapped up inside tarpaulin body-bags that had been lying on the side of the stage since the story began. But fundamentally, this was the kind of play in which people move around in slow-motion through a series of mannered poses, and one character will say something portentous and rather meaningless like "time is an ocean", after which the other characters pick up and echo the same refrain: "time..." "time is an ocean". I'm afraid I am instantly turned off by that. It is just too difficult to pull it off without sounding like a parody of utterly pretentious avant-garde theatre. In this case, they also made it worse by frequently shifting into song as well - and not always very melodically, or even entirely in tune.

So although I really liked the idea of the absent-yet-present Count, driving everyone mad without ever needing to appear in person, in the end this play was just trying rather too hard for my taste. I don't actually regret the evening spent watching it, but I won't be rushing to see another play by this theatre company again.

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I went to see this ten days ago with ms_siobhan at Seven Arts in Chapel Allerton. Thinking back, I believe it is the fourth stage adaptation of Dracula which I have seen in my lifetime, with the previous three being as follows:

• A production in Birmingham seen in my teens with my parents (i.e. some time around 1990), which I think was basically the Hamilton Deane play, or something not too dissimilar from it, but which I can't remember very much about now, except that part of the scenery fell down during the show.
• A multi-media production at the Grand Opera House in Belfast in 2005 starring Colin Baker as Van Helsing and Richard Bremmer as Dracula, set in the present day.
• An outdoor production at Kirkstall Abbey in Leeds last summer, set as a meta-drama presented by a group of undertakers at Jonathan Harker's funeral.

This was a different adaptation again - this one by John Godber and Jane Thornton, to be precise - and it was by far the truest to Stoker's novel which I have ever seen in any medium. Most of the dialogue was taken directly from the book, with the only real deviations occurring where actions and speech which are reported 'off-stage' (as it were) in the novel were translated into direct speech and action on the stage. Even then, the epistolary format of the original was preserved where possible, for example by showing people receiving and reading out letters from one another.

Obviously, a 1.5-hour stage adaptation couldn't hope to convey the entirety of the novel, though. Quincey Morris was omitted, as he often is, and so were Renfield and two of Draculas' three brides, while Dracula's journey on the Demeter was reported only from the point of view of Whitby residents after he had arrived. But other than that, both the language and the spirit of the novel were really well preserved, mainly thanks to a clever impressionistic approach used for some of the wider sweeps of the narrative. For example, the opening scenes in which Jonathan Harker travels to Dracula's castle were not played out in full, but instead conveyed by a sort of montage of key words and phrases spoken by cast members standing in a line on the stage - "Welcome to Transylvania"; "Please - for your mother's sake"; "For the dead travel fast"; and so on. All instantly recognisable and highly evocative, yet sketched out lightly and efficiently so that we could get on to the more detailed scenes set in the castle. On the whole, I think you would struggle to find a better translation of novel to stage than this one, although I had one small regret about it, which was that some of Mina's stronger scenes (e.g. where she takes the lead in gathering and sorting through all the records for the group of vampire-hunters) had dropped out, so that she lost some of her agency as a result.

The production itself was an amateur one, and we saw it on its opening night, but it was pretty good when judged on those terms. We were particularly impressed by the people playing Dr. Seward and the sole vampire bride (who also doubled-up as the maid who removes the garlic flowers from Lucy's room, thus creating nice extra layers to the narrative, since of course the maid would be helping Dracula if she is also his consort in disguise!). The rest of the cast were all perfectly solid, though we weren't so convinced by the decision to cast the same person as both Jonathan Harker and Arthur Holmwood, since it meant he was both Mina's husband and Lucy's fiancé, which had unintended resonances, and besides his chemistry as Arthur with Lucy was completely non-existent, so that when Van Helsing instructed him to kiss her it seemed more like a reluctant school-boy kissing his aunt than the impassioned kiss of a concerned lover. As for Dracula - well, it's a difficult role to play without slipping into pantomime, especially on stage where you cannot be as subtle as on film; he could have been better served by both the costume and the make-up departments; and we weren't sure the decision to have him speaking in a mock-Eastern European accent, or laughing maniacally from time to time was well-advised. But at least it looked like he was enjoying his evil machinations, and he definitely came across well when he got the chance to confront the band of vampire-hunters directly, and hurl some proper scorn and disdain in their general direction.

I think ms_siobhan was probably right to observe that £10 is a bit steep for amateur theatre, even in this inflated day and age, and on such a hot summer night I could have done with an interval and a long cool drink half-way through. But then again, they pulled in a good audience, filling about 80% of the seats I think, so I guess they had judged their price point about right. Anyway, a good bit of Draculising is always worth leaving the house for, and I would definitely show up for a performance of this particular adaptation again.

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Here's another thing I saw recently with ms_siobhan and planet_andy: a theatrical production of Bram Stoker's Dracula put on by these people in the grounds of Kirkstall Abbey. It was a blissful summer's day at the height of the heatwave, and the show was staged in what must once have been the abbey cloisters, but is now a large square enclosure carpeted with grass and overlooked by ruined towers and flocks of birds. We took picnics and folding chairs, and settled down in the early evening sunshine, while members of the cast circulated doing a little in-character banter:


The set-up was that they were the staff of an undertakers' company: Drakesmith and Graveston, services to the dead since 1822. They had been charged with conducting Jonathan Harker's funeral service, and were circulating around the mourners to enquire how we were connected with the deceased and sell us the following order of service for two florins:


Two pounds were agreed to be an acceptable exchange rate for the florins, and of course the order of service was also the programme for the show. As the performance began, the undertakers explained that as part of the funeral service they would be reading out extracts from Jonathan Harker's diary at his family's request, and as they did so they switched into the roles of the characters from the story, acting it out pretty much as it unfolds within the book. The letters, telegrams, diary entries and newspaper articles written by other characters were explained as having been pasted into Harker's diary as a complete record of his experiences. And although I was a little unsure about the use of the undertakers as a sort of framing device for the main story, in fact it worked pretty well. In between scenes, they discussed the strange events which they had been reading about with one another, wondering what might come next and how they might feel in the same situation - basically acting much like the chorus in a Greek tragedy to help bridge the gap between the real life of the audience and the fantastical world of the story.

You can't, of course, have very much in the way of complicated stage machinery or even exits and entrances when you are staging an outdoor show, so the performance relied very much on simple devices and the use of the audience's imagination. Coffins doubled as beds, steps, benches on the cliff at Whitby and seats in a railway carriage, while their lids served as castle doors when required, and the performers swiftly cast aside the cloak of one character or donned the skirts of another as they changed roles. But it all worked very effectively to sweep the imagination from craggy Transylvania one moment to bustling Victorian London the next. Indeed, the cast consisted of only five actors, with most of them doubling up not only as undertakers, but also as at least two characters each within the story. But again, the constraints proved a virtue, adding extra layers to the story. I especially liked the casting of the same actor as both Van Helsing and Dracula, which of course prevented the two from ever meeting of course but did position them very nicely as matched adversaries who have more in common than they would like to admit.

I was busy eating my picnic and then sipping the summery rose cocktail which I had prepared for the first hour or so of the show, but after that I realised that an outdoor performance in the sunshine meant that I could easily take photos without disturbing anybody. So I got to work, tweeting the results and prompting a lot of people to tweet back in response saying how cool it looked and they wished that they were there. You'll have to imagine the scene which took place at Castle Dracula, in Whitby and on the good ship Demeter in the first half of the story while I was eating and drinking, but these are ( the high points of the rest of the show )

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The 2005 Oxford Greek Play is nigh. Details, as copied from an email I received about it, are as follows:

( Euripides' Orestes, 12th-15th October )

swisstone has already expressed interest, and I'm certainly keen to go. Previous experience suggests it's likely to be pretty damned impressive. Is anyone else interested, and if so, which dates would be best for you?

In conversation about it, swisstone and I were gravitating towards Saturday 15th, which could of course mean either the matinee or the evening performance. I've already promised swisstone (and K if she'd like to come too?) my sofa-bed if required, I'm afraid, but then again if we went to the afternoon performance, it could be slotted fairly easily into a day-trip from almost anywhere in England anyway.

Let me know if you're interested! I'm quite happy to handle ticket-booking, etc.

Doctor Who

It actually just gets better and better, doesn't it? I mean: the little pile of M&Ms by the red telephone, the many alternative Tardises and, best of all, the Massive Weapons of Destruction. Did the old Who ever boast such delightful symbolism or topical resonance? I propose from this day forth always to say 'Massive Weapons of Destruction' in everyday conversation rather than 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' in tribute to this weekend's episode.

And if that all weren't enough, we have the Daleks to look forward to next Saturday night. * faints from excitement *

Lysistrata at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast

I went to see this on Saturday evening with my colleague, John Curran, our three MA students and one of their boyfriends. It was OK, but I think I've been rather spoiled by the stunning tragedies put on by the Actors of Dionysus, not to mention a bright and breezy student adaptation of the Birds which I saw while at Oxford, and which had translated all the references to contemporary Athens into references to modern-day Oxford instead. While AoD's tragedies are innovative, fresh adaptations, which offer profound contemporary relevance and stunning choreography and manage to strike at the very core of one's emotional being, and the Oxford Birds at least drew on the real experiences of its cast and crew, Saturday's Lysistrata was merely... average.

A pity, because Aristophanes' writing at the time was incredibly bold and topical, and of course there is plenty of local significance that could have been drawn out of a play between two warring communities whose women decide to draw the conflict to an end themselves by holding a sex strike. But the attempts made to do so were half-hearted, the translation sounded suspiciously to me like what I remember of the Penguin one, and many of the lines came across as simply being spoken: not meant. This will probably sound like the most snobbish thing I've ever said, but it felt... provincial.

Still, it was nice to go out with our students, and I'm sure we did much to promote intra-departmental bonding in the process. And I enjoyed some very nice pan-fried duck with a summer fruits sauce in a bistro where we ate before the performance. So by no means a wasted evening.