PATRICK MARMION first night review: Superstar Cynthia gets her teeth into wickedly good Dracula

Dracula – Noel Coward Theatre, London  

Rating:

Whatever else you can say about Cynthia Erivo in this ultra–high–tech staging of the Dracula legend, she is seldom less than wicked.

The sinuous, pocket–sized (5ft 1in) star was catapulted to superstardom thanks to the Wicked films, in which she starred alongside pop star Ariana Grande.

And now she is quite simply wicked all the way through this one–woman tour de force. Wicked meaning good. Wicked meaning exciting. And wicked meaning eerily creepy.

Over a very long and testing two hours and five minutes – unrelieved by the mercy of an interval – she gives an astonishing performance, playing a total of 23 characters from Bram Stoker's 19th–century Gothic horror novel.

It's a staggering enterprise, conceived and directed by Australian 'cine–theatre' creator Kip Williams, who in 2024 did something similar with Oscar Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Gray and Succession's Sarah Snook.

The stage starts completely bare before Erivo strides on, her image immediately projected live by camera operators on to a giant screen overhead. She writhes as a ghostly Dracula, fixed to the wall like a wriggling, pinioned moth.

Thence we follow her adventure to Transylvania as innocent solicitor Jonathan Harker to finalise a property deal with Dracula in his castle.

Pre–recorded footage of Erivo in other period outfits is now laid over live footage and more screens swing into view.

Dracula's concubine vampires come to haunt Harker, and the Count himself is spied shimmying up the castle battlements before appearing in a bright pink wig and sensational acrylic nails in front of a mirror that fails to yield his reflection.

Thus far I was with Erivo relating Harker's fearful journey into the supernatural in letters to his anxious fiancee Mina back home.

But for me at least, the wheels started to come off when we were introduced to Mina's best friend and her three suitors in Whitby – one of whom runs an asylum housing a straitjacketed Irishman who eats spiders to harvest their energy. The complexities of Stoker's plot start to scupper the complexities of Williams's staging.

Erivo, however, remains astonishing – despite struggling with Irish and Yorkshire accents before abandoning any attempt at an accent for the Dutch vampire slayer Van Helsing, who appears looking like Christopher Lee as Gandalf's nemesis Saruman in The Lord Of The Rings.

With a Nigerian accent for our titular Count, she is on safer ground and adds a little voodoo to the Transylvanian myth. Moreover, Erivo belts through her performance in a valiant attempt to keep energy up and the running time down.

But there is simply too much stuff to get through, with stake slayings in Hampstead graveyards and sea–born coffins still to come.

Fans may be untroubled by this. Two hours may even be insufficient in the company of Erivo, who is covered in runic tattoos and ear piercings that create the effect of pin cushions. Without question she generates a magnetic forcefield on stage.

Her range is remarkable, too – alternately placid, pert, prowling and predatory. A Tony Award–winning star of musical theatre in The Colour Purple, she despatches one melancholy torch song by Clemence Williams with wistful nonchalance.

Otherwise, her athletic efforts are magnified by a filmic soundtrack encompassing Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, Chopin, Bjork and even a bit of electro–trance music.

For truly this is a mind–bogglingly complex show, which goes beyond the kitchen sink in its attempts to create an audio–visual hallucination. Yet what's missing is old–fashioned suspense. We all know, roughly speaking, what's coming.

But I still find myself tipping my pointy hat to Erivo. Perhaps out of a sense of kinship.

After all, we theatre critics are not so far removed from her Count Dracula character: blood–sucking parasites who only come out at night.