Dracula (stage version) (NHB Modern Plays) E-Book

Bram Stoker

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

A thrilling adaptation, by acclaimed poet and playwright Liz Lochhead, that stays refreshingly close to Bram Stoker's classic novel. Asked to adapt it by the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, she immersed herself in the book. 'After a sleepless night,' she writes in the Introduction, 'my hair was standing on end, what with the mad Renfield in his lunatic asylum eating flies and playing John the Baptist to his coming master' and with Lucy's description of her "dream" of flying with the red-eyed one above the lighthouse at Whitby, and Jonathan's "dream" of the three Vampire Brides' advances upon him and of their being repelled at the last minute by the furious Dracula' 'This was before I'd even got to the abducted children or "the loving hand" of Lucy's fiane staking her through the heart' or that shocking rape-like bit where, with Mina's newly-wed husband Jonathan asleep in a flushed stupor by her side, Dracula, at her throat, takes his fill of her life's-blood' 'Still, what really attracted me to the story was Rule One for becoming a vampire-victim: "First of all you have to invite him in."' Ideal for schools and drama groups, this Dracula is all the more chilling for the respect it shows for Stoker's original nightmare creation. Liz Lochhead's version of Dracula premiered at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, in March 1985. 'Despite remaining faithful to Bram Stoker's original, Lochhead's version grapples with contemporary preoccupations: gender roles, the horrors of the 20th century, the battles between faith and reason, madness and sanity, democracy and aristocracy... an erudite revisiting of a primal myth' The Stage

Leseprobe

DRACULA

adapted from Bram Stoker’s novel by

Liz Lochhead

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Author’s Thanks

Original Production

Characters

Act One

Act Two

About the Authors

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Horace Walpole, lover of all things ‘Gothick’, inventing the whole genre of the Gothic novel in the eighteenth century, wrote: ‘I waked one morning… from a dream of which all I could recover was that I had thought myself in an ancient castle… and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour. In the evening I sat down to write.’

Mary Shelley, in her famous preface to the second edition of her Frankenstein, describes the early nineteenth-century genesis of her one and only – but truly great – hit: ‘I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me… I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together… He sleeps; but he is awakened… behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside… looking on him with yellow, watery but speculative eyes. I opened mine in terror.’ A waking nightmare then? (And her own description perhaps the very source of the age-old confusion between the creator and the created? It’s Frankenstein, not the Creature, that is the locus of the initial horror.) Oh, the intense excitement of the idea which, with those eyes wide open, broke in upon her: ‘I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others… I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.’ Inspired, she sat down and began to write.

At the end of the nineteenth century Bram Stoker sat him down and he began to write something that similarly burst its novelistic bonds to become a lasting, pure and popular myth. Dracula truly is the immortal undead, stake him through the heart as we do again and again in comic books and the late-night films that broadcast terror through the airways and enter our dreams. (It’s been said that Dracula has no shadow, because he is the shadow.) And Bram Stoker, his biographers report, also claimed to owe the genesis of the only work for which he is remembered, to a powerful nightmare.

My adaptation – a very free one it seems to me now, though a very faithful one it felt to me at the time – wasn’t called up in me by a dream. It was a case of first the phone call.

It is almost twenty-five years ago, almost half a lifetime, since Ian Wooldridge, then the newish Artistic Director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, called me – I think it was already the beginning of September — to ask if I’d like to do an adaptation of Dracula, scheduled in the programme for the following spring. Looking back, I suppose either someone else had let him down at that late date, or the rights weren’t available for an adaptation he wanted to use. I have no reason to imagine I would have been his first choice for the job.

I really didn’t think it sounded like my cup of tea either. ‘Probably just because he knows I wrote Blood and Ice (my first and, back then, only full-length play) about the Shelleys, Byron and the creation of Frankenstein, Ian imagines that I have a taste for the horror genre – and I don’t,’ I thought.

I was ashamed, though not as much as I ought to have been, to admit I’d never actually read the Bram Stoker classic. (My prejudice was that it was going to be very fin de siècle and sick — and probably very badly written.) But I said that I would do so and get back to him within the week. Next morning first thing I phoned and said I’d do it. No one else was getting this job!

This was after a sleepless night when I couldn’t put the book down, my hair standing on end at what was certainly very fin de siècle and very sick, but very compelling, what with mad Renfield in his lunatic asylum eating flies and playing John the Baptist to his coming master, muttering his not-so-cryptic prophesies; and with Lucy’s description of her ‘dream’ of flying with the red-eyed one above the lighthouse at Whitby; and Jonathan’s ‘dream’ (identical to Stoker’s own initiating one, apparently) of the three Vampire Brides’ advances upon him (‘There are kisses for us all…’) and of their being repelled at the last minute by the furious Dracula (‘This man belongs to me!’).

My ‘Yes!’ phone call was before I’d even got to the abducted children; or ‘the loving hand’ of Lucy’s fiancé staking her through the heart in her coffin ‘to bring her peace’; or that shocking rape-like bit where, with Mina’s newly-wed husband Jonathan asleep in a flushed stupor by her side, Dracula, at her throat, takes his fill of her life’s-blood before ripping open a vein in his own breast and ‘like a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink’ makes her suck at and swallow his.

Well, talk about ‘polymorphously perverse’ – you don’t have to be a psychoanalyst to have a field day with Bram Stoker’s sole masterpiece. Such scenes…

Still, what really attracted me, above all, to the story, what compelled me to say yes, gave me my ‘in’ to the whole thing, was Rule One for becoming a vampire-victim: ‘First of all you have to invite him in.’

What unappeased hunger in Lucy would cause her to invite him in?

As the eminently sensible, and psychically supremely healthy, maid Florrie – she’s my own invention, she doesn’t exist in Stoker’s novel – says when the already infected, already addicted, already dying Lucy is terrified by a scratching, a flapping at the window: ‘I didn’t say bogies didn’t exist, I just say bogies is all kinds and sorts of things except bogies.’

‘Vampires exist. Vampires exist where men believe them to,’ says the sceptical, rational psychiatrist, Seward, before Van Helsing, along with the terrible happenings described so vividly in Stoker’s ‘workaday prose’ from so many different corroborating, matter-of-fact reports, letters and sources (all of which make for the verisimilitude of this epistolary novel), finally convince him there really are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in his psychology.

‘First of all you had to invite him in…’ Wonderful. I sat down and I began to write.

There were Lucy and Mina, instantly refigured as sisters, in their garden by the sea; there, next door to that weird house, Carfax, which Jonathan Harker was surveying to sell to his overseas buyer, was the madhouse in London, where poor zoophagous Renfield raved…

Rereading it now, my version – and I haven’t for years – I see what a strong debt the whole atmosphere of it owes to my other reading at the time. My appetites have always found deeply satisfying the work of Isak Dinesen (real name: Karen Blixen, the Danish baroness, author of Out of Africa), whose Seven Gothic Tales and, especially, her Winter’s Tales are so pervaded by loneliness and longing. And an aching luminous loveliness and ‘bottomless wisdom’. She’s like an even more deeply visionary and romantic Hans Christian Andersen – for grown-ups, though.

I also by then had read, and reread – it’s so gorgeous — The Bloody Chamber, by the great and original Angela Carter, whose equally delicious but deliberately more ornate and baroquely romantic tales were also soul food for the feminine imagination.

‘The Bloody Chamber is like a multifaceted glittering diamond reflecting and refracting a variety of portraits of desire and sexuality – heterosexual female sexuality – which, unusually for the time, 1979, are told from a heterosexual female viewpoint,’ writes Helen Simpson in her introduction to a brand new edition of the book a couple of years ago.

I always knew – who couldn’t? – that Dracula was a narrative of suppressed sexuality and sexual guilt, but I am amazed at how much this, and especially heterosexual female sexual guilt, which I felt – oh, quite erroneously obviously – that I was both above and beyond by 1985, pervades my own account of the tale on subterranean levels.

I haven’t reread Bram Stoker’s Dracula for over twenty years now, and I am not sure I could. I think I sated myself on it then. Like Angela Carter, with her Charles Perrault and with her traditional folk and fairy tales, I suppose I was using what was latent in Dracula – and not that latent, for crying out loud! – and both making it overt and starting over with it. But, at the same time, every invention or intervention of my own was only an attempt, in a different medium, to faithfully tell that story of his.

Certainly it’s a strange thing, revisiting one’s own back pages. Angela Carter ‘always knew she was drawn to Gothic tales, cruel tales, tales of wonder, tales of terror, fabulous narratives that deal directly with the imagery of the unconscious’. From rereading now my version of Dracula I seem, at that time of writing, to be in the act of becoming boldly, quite unselfconsciously and on the public stage, conscious of just how interested in the unconscious I was! If there is a strong element of pastiche, there is nothing of the spoof or the reductive in this retelling. I took it seriously. High-hokum as we all know it is, Dracula is truly great high-hokum.

I wasn’t, in my personal life, very happy at the time, but what above all I remember is the deep comfort I found that winter in the intensity, almost Gothic intensity, of all that obsessive writing and rewriting.

As they say, the consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation.

Liz LochheadMay 2009

Thanks

The author would like to thank Ian Wooldridge for commissioning Dracula, Hugh Hodgart for nursing it through several drafts and the entire first cast at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, for the many excellent contributions they made to the script.