Dracula Tickets

“I can't watch horror - I get horrendous nightmares” the Tony-nominated director admits, so why has Kip Williams sunk his teeth into an ambitious adaptation of Dracula? Well, it wasn’t for the blood and gore of the gothic classic “I was drawn to the social, cultural and scientific progress of the era, as well as the puritanical push back it encountered…it questions the values and paradigms that are seemingly having their apotheosis today” he explained.

Williams' critically acclaimed works hold a mirror to society - literally in the case of the Olivier Award-winning The Picture of Dorian Gray. So it’s not surprising that Dracula, the latest in Williams’ cinetheatre trilogy, is a strikingly contemporary meditation on identity, surveillance and selfhood. “All of Stoker’s characters are caught in complex acts of self-curation and censorship - in a way that mirrors our lives today. I'm interested in the way they struggle to embrace their authentic self, and for me, part of what makes that challenging today is the fear that we are being watched by those who will not accept us” 

In Williams’ hands, Dracula is no longer just a blooducking (and bloodcurdling) gothic tale, but a piercing examination of our public and private selves, and the monsters we create in order to protect ourselves. Using cameras and giant screens, he has transformed Stoker’s world into something eerily recognisable, where identity is constantly performed. Williams’ explains “I believe very much in the Shakespearean notion of holding the mirror up to nature, so it is impossible as a contemporary artist to not be grappling with the way this technology is infiltrating so much of our lives”

We sat down with Williams to discuss the challenges of bringing an undead, centuries old vampire to life live on stage (and screen). 

How did you direct Cynthia Erivo’s performance for both the live audience and the camera simultaneously?

The cinetheatre form requires a performance style that is both cinematic and theatrical. It requires the actor to be alive to the immediacy of the camera, whilst maintaining a scale that holds a 900 seat auditorium. Cynthia and I often spoke about scale, and playing with when she might explore being smaller to accentuate the tension of Stoker's ghost story, and when the scale might become more operatic as the emotions of the characters boil over. While we're shooting the pre-record elements, we kept reminding ourselves how the scale of image was operating within the theatre proscenium as a way to keep these performances matching those that would take place months later on stage.