NOTES FROM THE PLAYWRIGHT
I really got my start in playwriting with adaptations—some like Twain and Dickens are relatively easy since they are filled with great dialogue. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, however, is a different animal for there is no dialogue. The book is written as if it’s a collection of letters or journal and diary entries. Often with adaptations, I try to find parts of the story that have been left out or take key elements and reimagine them in new ways. For Dracula, King of Vampires, I tried to do just that. I thought it was important to show how Count Dracula made it to England, and indeed there is a scene in which the ship on which he is traveling mysteriously washes up on the shore with all of the crew dead. As authorities come to investigate, we get a glimpse of Dracula peeking out of a packing crate loaded with the soil of Transylvania in which he rests, and then a moment later, he is transformed into a wolf.
One of the challenges is that everyone knows this story. Many of the classic adaptations have characters bumbling around for much of the play trying to figure out what’s going on and finally, at last discovering that there is a vampire in their midst. But to my mind, for today’s audiences that falls flat. I imagined the famed Dr. Seward and Professor Van Helsing going down the wrong road by diagnosing hydrophobia (rabies) and prescribing a transfusion for Mina’s unusual anemia. Who offers to supply the blood? None other than her new friend, Count Dracula comes to the rescue.
Also since modern audiences know just what Count Dracula is up too, it seemed to be more fun to see him cleverly covering his tracks and having some fun along the way. He first appears at a costume ball dressed as a sheep to Mina’s Little Bo Peep costume—a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Opening up the play from a drawing room single set mystery, I’ve taken advantage of the novel’s many locales… Count Dracula’s castle, Dr. Seward’s estate, the asylum that adjoins the estate, a midnight shipwreck and for the finale—a haunting crypt. All of these were imaginatively created —each set has a point—a ship’s bowsprit, the points of the castle, a curtain rod with sharpened finials—even topiary trees with sharpened points. While there were realistic elements most of the play was played against giant drops with ghostly grey cloudlike swirls onto which gobos and shadows could be projected. I was trained as a set designer, so design elements are often front and center in my writing though I’m am perfectly happy to see other directors and designers discover new ways of bringing a script to life.
Though most versions of Dracula end with a stake through his heart, this isn’t at all how the novel ends. While I don’t exactly end the play the way the novel ends, I did take my cue from Bram Stoker’s original, so that in Dracula, King of Vampires, Dracula meets his end from the same crippling final blow that strikes him dead in the novel.
Julian Wiles,
Playwright