It is hard to bring originality or freshness of vision to a story as well-known as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and yet this new production by Edinburgh’s Think Outside the Box Theatre goes some way to achieving just that. This is a radically re-imagined transformation of the original source material, cleverly incorporating the audience into the production by placing the stage amidst the chairs and the majority of the action between the rows of seats. The show’s programme lists a horror house the company visited in Spain last year as an inspiration, and this point of reference is easy to see in the final product: sitting in the audience for this show is very much like being in a theme park House of Horrors, with the same interactive shocks and sense of growing, invasive unease.
The cast, made up of students from Edinburgh’s Telford College, are uniformly competent, with some real stand-out performances lurking in the murky depths of the blood-soaked play. Pearl Appleby is extremely effective as the female Renfield, spending almost the entirety of the production locked in a cage in the midst of the audience and never once leaving character or toning down her manic, madness-induced acrobatics. Indeed, her shrieking, gibbering performance is one of the most unsettling features of the play, while her proximity to the audience only adds to the sense that at any moment her insanity might break out and be let loose amongst us. Hugh Burgess lends a highly sensual elegance to Dracula that takes the simmering sexual undertones of the original novel and hams them up to maximum effect; such a performance might have been trite if it didn’t blend so perfectly with the show’s pervading atmosphere of slightly camp, over-ripe horror.
The layout of the set does mean that some parts of the show are difficult to hear, or even see clearly. While this might be very much the point of the production, it will no doubt feel frustrating to some members of the audience. Likewise, the shock-inducing antics of the cast often involve characters sneaking up behind the audience and frightening the unwary - an effective technique that nevertheless won’t be to everyone’s taste. This is immersive theatre that doesn’t make room for detached onlookers; if you are the kind of person who usually stays away from the ghost train at amusement parks then approach with caution. For the duly prepared, however, this is an entertainingly disturbing, highly unusual staging of a horror classic.
