A vampire by any other name
I was delighted to hear that BBC Radio would be
returning to Dracula after having
adapted it more than 10 years ago, in 1998, in a lavish 7-part version adaped
by Nick McCarty and directed by Hamish Wilson.
I was especially curious given that the newest version was compressing
the enormous book into a mere two hours to fit the Classic Serial slot. Having looked at the BBC’s vampire dramas in
detail in the last year due to my academic work coinciding with the Dracula and
the Gothic conference held in Braga, Portugal, this last May, I am not
surprised to say that I enjoyed Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s version and cannot
honestly say which of the two I prefer.
It really depends on what kind of vampire fan you are.
The narrative in the novel Dracula has been said by Carol Senf to “resembles a vast jigsaw
puzzle of isolated and frequently trivial facts.” Lenkiewicz has approached this in a very
interesting way by opening the radio adaptation with something approaching sound
collage, with the disparate voices of the main characters woven in with music
as they set the scene for the future events.
Senf has also raised questions of
the reliability of the narrators in Dracula,
given the fact that “the narrators appear to speak with one voice.” While I have found it true that it can be
difficult for the ear to differentiate between the male leads (either between
Harker and Holmwood or between Holmwood and Seward), the narrative sameness some
might accuse the novel of is, in theory, not a problem in radio. What struck me about the 1998 adaptation was
that, even though many characters persisted in telling us their tales through
the diaries and letters Stoker originally gave them, the phonograph device of
Seward’s diary—surely a boon for a radio play?—had been completely abandoned. Lenkiewicz seemed to go even further,
presenting most of the scenes as they happened rather than one character’s
communication to another.
One narrative device I enjoyed from the 1998
adaptation was a framing narrative, in which the maddened Harker related in flashback
his experiences to the sympathetic Mother Superior and Sister Agnes of the
convent in Budapest. While Mina does
eventually find Harker in the convent and marry him, as in the book, not much
time is spared for the poor put-upon sisters in Lenkiewicz’s version. Instead, Harker’s letters to Mina are a great
deal shorter, though I was impressed at the way some of the less creepy and
more travelogue-esque opinions of Harker—such as descriptions of the fruit
trees on the way to the Borgo Pass—were kept in. There were fewer wolves in Lenkiewicz’s
Transylvania, and we were totally deprived of one of my favorite scenes in the
story, in which Harker sees Dracula climb up the wall of the castle, proving
once and for all that we are dealing with a supernatural figure.
This is all, however, concurrent with Lenkiewicz’s visions
of Harker and of the Count. Her Count,
played by Nicky Henson, is particularly verbose. Every single line the Count had in Dracula has been scooped up by him and
several more reams of dialogue have been invented. While I was particularly frightened by the
spare pronouncements of Frederick Jaeger’s Dracula in the 1998 adaptation, Henson’s
focused less on taunting Harker, his prisoner, and more on exploiting his
knowledge of England, which is one reason the vampire has imprisoned him in the
first place. This Dracula is an
extremely cold, calculating, and sarcastic villain; I think the emphasis when
he talks about being lonely and not wishing to live in buildings that are new
is on his own irony. In a sense, it’s
almost as if he knows about the fourth wall and is making himself seem more
sympathetic. Yet, by his actions, and by
the way he treats Mina and Lucy, we know he is basically without redemption. The
shaving scenes in the two versions are case-in-point: the 1998 version lingers on Harker’s horror
and his near-hysteria; the 2012 version makes Dracula more verbose and almost
teasing as he throws the mirror away.
Also telling are the two versions’ approaches to
the Brides (although, eschewing tradition, Lenkiewicz calls them “Vampiresses”). The Brides’ advance on Harker in the book
makes very clear the erotic overtones of Christopher Craft’s famous “a feminine
form but a masculine penetration.”
Interestingly, and as a thematic concern that is reproduced several
times in the 2012 version, Harker is the one who seems to experience the erotic
during the Brides’ approach, whereas the Brides themselves seem to regard him
only in terms of sustenance. There is
less of the keening and moaning that the actresses were called upon to produce
for the 1998 version. In a 2012, post-Twilight world where humanity has
already been seduced sexually by the vampire, the vampire can show his or her
complete indifference to the sexual appetites of humans—they are merely food
and drink. It is worth noting that Harker, played by Michael Shelford, has been
beefed up. Although the Brides’ approach
inspires him with lust, he is not depicted in a subservient, sexually
submissive role to them, and in general his near-hysterics have been toned
down. He is more effective, he is more
conventionally masculine, as if he had absorbed the absent Quincey’s
personality.
This is the first Dracula adaptation I know of written by a woman, and I wonder
whether that is significant in light of the way Mina’s and Lucy’s characters
have been rewritten. Ellie Kendrick, a
favorite young radio actress of mine, plays Mina, and Scarlett Brookes plays
her best friend, Lucy. Lucy has perennially
been condemned or lauded for the fact in the novel she wonders (innocently or
knowingly) why she cannot marry all three of her suitors. Many people believe that Stoker meant to show,
misogynistically, that because Lucy showed herself to be sexually available,
she received the punishment of turning into a vampire and then being staked. Whether you agree with this interpretation or
not, I think Lucy has been written with more nuance and feeling in this
version.
For one thing, she only has two suitors. For another, she never actually encourages
Dr. John Seward’s affections and in fact tells Mina she feels quite awkward at
having been proposed to him by him. The
proposal and rejection scene is played less for laughs than in the 1998
version, where the bumbling Seward sat on his hat by way of showing how nervous
he was; in this version, the inner thoughts of both are revealed to the
listener, and the resulting is painfully embarrassing. It is with some relief that we realize Lucy
will be much happier with Arthur Holmwood, Lord Godalming, who has sought her
hand. All of this, however, gives more
flesh-and-blood oomph to the fact
that later Dr Seward has to examine Lucy from a medical perspective. One reason for Lucy’s delay in getting
medical help after being bitten, we find, is that she is embarrassed to have to
see Seward again. This feels very natural
to me, and is far cry from the Grail Knight mentality of the original Crew of
Light; here at least there is the hint that Holmwood and Seward might think of
each other as rivals on Lucy’s deathbed.
Mina, although a heroic character in any form, also feels a bit less
buttoned-up, restricted by her super-proper New Woman role. There is less wordage lavished on how
incredibly Good she is, and she doesn’t defend writing her diary as being of
some use to her fiancé. Both women have
been cast exceedingly young (and it is sometimes difficult to tell them apart
on audio).
I was sad to realize that Quincey Morris, the Texan
member of the Crew of Light, had been completely excised from Lenkiewicz’s
version. I understand that you need to
cut someone—and in light of Lucy’s less devil-may-care attitude about suitors,
it’s a natural choice. Although he adds
a nice bit of color and another masculine presence, Quincey probably won’t be
missed by most. Nevertheless, I put
forth a bold proposition: why not
Renfield? I have never quite understood
what Renfield’s purpose in the novel is.
He gives Dr Seward something to do while he pines over Lucy; he is a bit
of a Dracula-barometer in that he creates narrative foreshadowing and tension
as to what exactly will happen when his “Master” arrives; he facilitates the
helpful coincidence that Dracula’s abode will be Carfax, which is next-door to
the lunatic asylum. In the 1931 film
version, Renfield and Harker’s characters were combined into one. In the 1998 version, he had some very funny
lines. In the New Mexico Ballet
performance of Dracula—a version that
has stayed in my mind’s eye for years—Renfield as played by Pablo Rodarte
vividly ate his flies on stage. Although
I am a fan of Don Gilet’s, and he makes an unusually good Renfield, I still can’t
answer my own question about his function.
Necessarily the scenes in Whitby have been
shortened in this version; much of the dramatic set up from the book has been
excised, and the way the Demeter arrives
and disgorges its black dog is actually rather sub-par. Presumably Mina’s eyesight is really
extraordinary as she sits up on the cliff with Lucy and the old sailor and is
able to see the Demeter crash and the
unfortunate captain lashed to the wheel.
Perhaps I’m being unfair, given that, in my opinion, the best Dracula adaptation is not actually the
story of Dracula at all—at least, not
entirely. It’s Robert Forrest’s play The Voyage of the Demeter.
Nevertheless, when Dracula attacks Lucy for the
first time, the scene happens from their perspective, rather than Mina’s, which
is unusual and gives Dracula even more time to talk. It’s clear from the way he approaches Lucy
here, and later in the play, by the explicit sexual language, that he is
appealing to some subconscious desire in her for sexual fulfilment. She wants to be seduced sexually; he just
wants to be invited to suck her blood.
There is no tenderness or even eroticism to Dracula here; as the Brides
say, he cannot and does not love. Dracula behaves thus to Lucy until she dies
and also with Mina. When he bites Mina
for the first time, it is even suggested that she is mostly asleep and mistakes
the male presence for her husband.
Subsequently, he is even more brutal to her, saying cuttingly, “Come
now, my child, this is not our first time.” Now, I have a ghoulish enjoyment in
tracking the graphic nature of horror story special effects on audio, and the
biting and sucking sounds employed whenever a vampire bites someone in this
version of Dracula are positively
horrific. I may even be justified in
saying they are over-the-top.
What is not over-the-top—and
perhaps for the first time ever—is the depiction of Van Helsing, played by John
Dougall. I have a great fondness for the
Van Helsing played by Finlay Welsh in the 1998 version because he also played Captain
Rapelsky in Voyage of the Demeter. However, it must be said that Stoker’s
writing of Van Helsing is a caricature at best, with the kind of Dutch accent
that has probably never existed in nature.
Nevertheless, I did miss some of Van Helsing’s excesses from the book, especially
the “King Laugh” speech. This Van
Helsing was to the point, with a very muted Dutch accent.
It appears that in bringing pace and a touch of
emotional reality to Dracula, we have
had to forego all of the “hyperrealistic” elements that give the book pace. What I mean by this is that, not only have we
lost most of the diaries and letters, and excised the phonographic records,
none of the newspaper clippings and logs from the novel have survived either
(to be fair, Glyn Dearman’s Sherlock
Holmes vs Dracula used many of these devices, which may have worked for
establishing a suitably Holmesian atmosphere but did not really succeed in
creating a gripping drama). For example,
instead of consulting the newspaper to find out about the missing children on
Hampstead Heath after the death of Lucy, a helpful policeman tells Holmwood all
about it. (I wish the radio versions
wouldn’t leave the wolf out. That’s one
of my favorite parts of the novel.)
In Lenkiewicz’s version, narration is almost always
privileged over dialogue-desciption. Let’s
take, for example, the staking of Lucy scene in the Westenra vaults—one of the
best and most enduring of all the scenes in Dracula. When Dermot Rattigan suggests that radio
drama promotes “an imaginary sense of visual allusion through its creative and
carefully composed use of all sounds including verbal, nonverbal, music, etc.,”
he could be describing this scene. In
the 2012 version, the action is not conveyed via dialogue between the men as in
this excerpt from the 1998 version:
SFX: screaming
and cries
MORRIS:
Look over there! By the trees.
HOLMWOOD: It’s her!
SFX: child
struggling, crying
SEWARD: She’s bending her face to the child’s
neck, Van Helsing, stop her!
HOLMWOOD: Yes, we can see her blood, oozing over her mouth and over
her grave clothes, her lips crimson and glistening . . .
SFX: the
child cries out
HOLMWOOD: No, stop her!
In this version, Seward tell us, the listeners, the
visuals we cannot make out, in real-time.
Nevertheless, we still feel the atmosphere evoked so hauntingly in prose
(“when the flowers hung lank and dead, their whites turning to rust and their
greens to browns . . . and rusty, dark iron, and tarnished brass, and clouded
silver plating gave back the feeble glimmer of a candle”). Another iconic scene which has been rendered
in both exciting terms and faithfully to the book is the entrance on Carfax,
the abandoned abbey where Dracula has sent some of his boxes of earth.
With the death of Lucy as the cliffhanger of the first
episode, we are able to move rapidly through the events of the second half of
the book, with what seems like less compression, though the characters seem to
accept the events that are overtaking them with surprising alacrity. By the time the Crew of Light have reached
Romania, they have split up as they track the Count by water and by land. There is a detailed scene of Van Helsing
seeking out the Vampiresses and staking them all as they are asleep in their
coffins, but rather strangely they never come to tempt Mina out of the circle
of safety Van Helsing draws for her.
I always feel a sense of satisfaction when I reach
the end of the novel. However, the radio
versions I have encountered tend to end with an anticlimax. In the 1998 version, the final scene in which Dracula is consigned to dust becomes confused and
ends abruptly, especially for the reader of the book who might be expecting an
epilogue. It is Mina who narrates the
last scene of Lenkiewicz’s version, which sees her husband triumph and the
death of Arthur Holmwood in place of Quincey Morris, as sacrificial
victim. In the 1998 version, Dracula’s
last performance is anticlimactic, merely gasping, gurgling, and repeating
“No!” This is followed by wolves
howling, eerie music, and the credits rolling.
In the 2012 version, however, he has even less to do; this particularly garrulous
Dracula is conspicuously silent. “Dracula’s
crossing of boundaries is relentless”; in crossing over into radio adaptation,
he has no final word and crumbles into dust almost as an afterthought (Botting
1999, 150).
Lenkiewicz’s Dracula has a beautiful score, including
lovely Romanian folk music which forms the bookends and transitions between the
scenes.
Do listen to this version
of Dracula and enjoy all that the
Gothic Imagination has to offer on BBC Radio 4 & Radio 4extra.
