I had fairly high hopes for the Mercury Theater of the Air’s
1938 Dracula, preceding their famous
adaptation of War of the Worlds by a
matter of months. However, it was their
first adaptation in this style, and though the anecdotes about it being hashed
out by Houseman and Welles in an all-night diner over steak and cognac is
amusing, that doesn’t make it more than a middling effort. Of the three full-length straight adaptations
of Dracula I’ve heard (the 1998
seven-hour BBC one and the svelte two-hour BBC one from 2012), it easily
drifted to the bottom (even parts of Sherlock
Holmes vs Dracula had it soundly beaten).
The question is, why? Why did
Houseman and Welles fundamentally misunderstand or wilfully misrepresent the
book? With the 1931 Dracula in people’s minds, perhaps Houseman and Welles’ attempts to
take it “back to the book” was more in reaction to the film?
The major problem with Dracula
à la Houseman and Welles is that it excises the sexual heart of the
story. I can only wonder why? Was it to make Jonathan Harker look more
manly? The adaptation spends a great
deal of time and effort on getting Jonathan to the castle (kudos, though, for depicting
the scene as Dracula, in disguise as the coachman, drives Jonathan down the
Borgo Pass with the wolves following them on both sides) and then letting him
sit their impotently but merely at the risk of death and abandonment, not to
the loss of his immortal soul via the sins the of the flesh. There are, regrettably, no Brides. But the real travesty, which is difficult to
justify, is the fact that Mina Harker doesn’t show up until about twenty
minutes into the drama! It’s all very
well excising characters like Arthur, Lord Godalming, Quincey Morris, and
Renfield, all of whom are absent from this version, but neutering Mina’s power
is cringe-worthy.
One could argue that the downgrading of hers and Lucy’s
roles—Lucy barely has a staking scene, much less much a life—at least allows
them to bow out gracefully instead of being made fun of, as Stoker sometimes
seems to do, unintentionally (Mina being described over and over by characters
as an angel, Lucy being penalized for wanting to marry three men). However, I don’t buy it—Rebecca ‘s adaptation
understood the female characters in Dracula,
perhaps for the first time, so it can be done, and with limited time
resources, too. Dracula himself is in general less voluble
than some later adaptations make him, which is in some senses preferable,
though he does go on about “blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh” in a suitably
Welles-ian seductive way (Edward Cullen could take a page out of the Welles-Dracula
book). There are no Brides to say that
Dracula could never feel love, ergo in this case there is some justification
for a romantic interpretation à la Bram
Stoker’s Dracula.
Granted, it’s a bit like kicking a man when he’s down to
apply standards of the 1990s and 2000s to one of American radio’s earlier
attempts at unsponsored, serious dramatic adaptation work, but there’s the
tantalizing glimpse of how bloody good the Mercury Theatre on the Air could be
with War of the Worlds. This is, of course, also live radio. As such, I found the sound quality remarkably
poor in some sections and had to imagine what was being said rather than
actually hear it. A sound effect at
which this adaptation excelled were wolves howling, which sounded much more
organic than the wolves from the 1998 BBC adaptation (I’m not sure how they
managed that in studio!). However, there
were not a huge amount of sound effects used (for obvious reasons), and
narrative rather than dramatized scenes was the norm for conveying action.
The last fifteen minutes, easily the most gripping, diverged
rather wildly from the book. Although
Mina was tempted by Dracula, the Brides were obviously not there so Van Helsing
didn’t have to destroy them; there was no holy circle in the snow; Mina didn’t
even have the holy wafer burned onto her forehead. Dracula was more betrayed by human error than
anything else; in the pursuit, his servants dropped his coffin on the rocks,
which split open. The sun was going down
so he was trapped. The one good thing you
could say about it was that Mina struck the killing blow, surprising the others
who thought she was going to let Dracula transform and escape.
