Unfaithful? The BBC’S Dracula was just as Stoker would have wanted
Viewers complaining that the new adaptation took too many liberties are missing the point, argues
One moment in BBC One’s Dracula seemed particularly designed to tweak the noses of purists. “Can’t bear a bad book,” griped Claes Bang’s Count, yawning over a hardback that might as well have been Dracula. Cynics might think Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat – the writers of last week’s mischievous miniseries – were just as dismissive of Bram Stoker’s gothic classic. After all, they ditched half the novel’s characters, turned Van Helsing into a wisecracking atheist nun, and in a daring final-episode twist dragged Drac into the 21st century.
Legions of cold, lifeless types arose to groan about it being “unfaithful”. Dolly Wells’s Agatha Van Helsing, in particular, has got it in the neck from pedants, who are also vexed by the reinvention of the novel’s very serious vampire as a bisexual spouting Bond-esque one-liners. But to anyone who loves Stoker’s novel, and admires the many afterlives of his unkillable creation, these complaints are absolute tosh – for three reasons.
First, Dracula has been reinvented since the beginning. The first proper dramatisation, a 1924 play, took wild liberties with Stoker’s story. Jonathan Harker’s fiancé Mina was written out, and he was engaged instead to Lucy – who in another change became the daughter of Dr Seward (one of her love-interests from the novel). Does all this matter? Audiences didn’t think so. The play was a West End hit, and the 1927 Broadway transfer launched the career of Bela Lugosi.
Any version that slavishly followed the book would be unfaithful to the century-long tradition of clever reworkings. Like Sherlock Holmes
– also modernised by Gatiss and Moffat as the BBC’S Sherlock – the endless retellings have become part of the story. Dracula now carries the baggage of Nosferatu, of Christopher Lee, and even of Bela Lugosi in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Besides, the most accurate adaptation was arguably the worst: Stoker’s own 1897 stage-play, a turgid six-hour slog, written in haste and performed just once, at the
Tristram Fane Saunders
Lyceum in Covent Garden, as a legal wheeze to secure his copyright. (Only two tickets were sold.)
Secondly, the screenwriters’ respect for the book was evident through a hundred loving winks and references – details such as the child calling the beautiful Lucy a “bloofer lady”, or the Dracula-obsessed Renfield’s habit of eating flies. Some of the most memorable moments from Jonathan Harker’s arrival at Dracula’s castle were recreated almost verbatim, but even when the series leapt 123 years into the future, it never entirely lost sight of the original. Half the fun of the show was looking out for reinvented characters from the book – Texan cowboy Quincey turning up as a nightclub-prowling ladies’ man, for instance.
Rather than inventing a story from scratch, Gatiss and Moffat started from elements already present in the book. The few pages dealing with the voyage of the doomed Demerter were boldly expanded into an entire episode. You might think Sister Agatha was an entirely new invention, but “Sister Agatha, who is a good creature and a born nurse” appears very briefly in the novel as a nun nursing Harker after his Transylvanian ordeal – just as she did in the show. Meanwhile, the much-talkedabout bisexuality of Bang’s Dracula wouldn’t exist without the quivering current of forbidden sexuality that runs through the book, which Stoker wrote during his friend Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment for gross indecency.
Then there’s the third, and most important, reason to ignore those children of the night who have been howling on Twitter about this update. Bringing the musty old myth of the vampire into the present day was precisely what Bram Stoker was trying to do. Dracula is stuffed with cuttingedge technology. It’s set in a world of phonographs, typewriters and reliable blood transfusions, none of which really caught on until the mid-1880s. If Stoker had written Dracula today, he would certainly have given Dr Seward a smartphone. Treating the book as a museum-piece would be missing the point, but ditching the Victorian trappings would be just as much of a mistake. By leaping between past and present, this ingenious adaptation found a way to have its blood-soaked cake, and eat it, too.