FANGTASTICALLY GOOD TIME
Plenty of laughs in Dracula spoof
Vertigo Theatre’s production of Dracula: The Bloody Truth is bloody good fun.
The play is part of a relatively new British theatrical genre that combines elements of farce, pantomime, melodrama, vaudeville and parody, relying heavily on slapstick and tomfoolery. It owes a great deal to Monty Python’s Flying Circus and The Three Stooges, and great cinema clowns like Peter Sellers, Rowan Atkins and Jerry Lewis.
Dracula: The Bloody Truth was created by Le Navet Bete, a clown theatre company in Exeter, England, that for a decade has specialized in producing wildly silly Christmas pantomimes spoofing everything from A Christmas Carol and The Jungle Book to Robin Hood and The Wizard of Oz.
The gimmick was that these stories, no matter how many characters, were told by four male actors.
Le Navet Bete hit comedy gold when they decided to tackle Bram Stoker’s vampire classic Dracula, having their quartet play more than 40 characters. The show has been touring Britain for most of 2018 and is booked well into 2019. It might well find its way to London’s West End.
Vertigo Theatre’s artistic director, Craig Hall, secured the rights to create a Calgary version and what he delivers is two hours of inspired lunacy. It’s such a joy to hear the kind of unrestrained, raucous laughter his barrage of unapologetic hijinks produces. If laughter is indeed good medicine, Hall’s Dracula: The Bloody Truth is a double dose of the very best.
Hall’s greatest move was to cast Christopher Hunt, Natascha Girgis, Julie Orton and Stafford Perry — four tireless, talented chameleons. It takes stellar actors to play bad actors and that’s what the play demands.
Hunt plays the famed vampire slayer Abraham Van Helsing as a bitter, surly curmudgeon who accuses Stoker of sabotaging the real story of Dracula for monetary gain and promises the audience he and his three actors will set the story straight. As his proteges, Girgis, Perry and Orton are eager to help, quite literally throwing themselves into the assignment.
Perry gets to play Dracula with a set of dentures that rival the teeth of the late Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, and an accent that wanders all over the globe as does the vampire himself in this story.
Orton, Perry, Hunt and Girgis are undaunted even when furniture and set pieces collapse and the physical abuse each suffers, though obviously staged, is realistic enough to get gasps, guffaws and applause. The genius is they make the nonsense seem so simple and easy, the greatest trick of all because their performances demand precise comic timing.
This illusion is also true for Scott Reid’s set design and Deitra Kalyn’s costumes.
Vertigo’s Dracula: The Bloody Truth is a first-rate production that masquerades as a lowbrow theatre experience.