It's a shame it's all wasted. The text attempts to do two things that are contradictory, and accomplishes neither: Lane's interpretation of Bram Stoker starts off as very faithful, perhaps to the extreme, as it succeeds in advancing the story by letters, newspaper articles, logs, diaries & journals, just like Stoker's– but then suddenly the dialogue turns into a critique of British colonialism that diverts greatly from the source-material; so which is it? Does the script aspire to evoke the sensations of the text or does it want to veer off by hammering in which character is a suffragette, or making an incisive comments about the abandonment of women through sectioning?
Because it does the latter convincingly, but to the deterrent of making Dracula really count; for while some scenes were very indeed pogniantly observant of the societal context, I felt that the protagonism of Dracula was thus diluted; that the action-scenes were clumsy, and that the suspense that rose greatly in the first two acts evaporated in by the closing hour of this 2h30 affair: perhaps this intention to achieve so much could have been focused on executing fewer aspects of Dracula to a fuller extent, foregoing some aspects in favour of others– whichever way it might go: certainly, there is room to add context and critique to a work, but perhaps a satire is more suited for those purposes. Or, if Dracula is meant to represent something scary, perhaps he should be scary first.
I always perk-up my ears when leaving a show, and yesterday I overheard complains about the plot being difficult to follow due to the constant flashbacks & character swaps. While I don't think any of this was problematic, and even enjoyed the solutions presented had for pulling this production off with such a limited cast, I do understand that not everyone might recall the book or the films, which does help sort out the who's who of any production where cast members have multiple roles.
All in all, I thought the production was great, but could have been made stronger by picking (and sticking) to a lane. Three out of four fangs for me.