Cynthia Erivo stars as all 23 characters in a high-tech London staging of Bram Stoker's novel, directed by Kip Williams. The one-woman show has divided critics, with some praising its ambition and others finding it lacking in drama.
The Guardian's Arifa Akbar notes that Erivo dons wigs and skirts to play Mina and Lucy, and spectacles for Dr Seward, but feels the actor seems ill at ease with the material. 'There's a hesitancy about her performance, as if she were wrong-footed by the technology that surrounds her,' Akbar writes, adding that the individual voices are not always properly differentiated.
However, The Times gives a more positive review, calling Erivo's range 'remarkable – alternately placid, pert, prowling and predatory'. The review praises her athletic efforts, magnified by a filmic soundtrack including Tchaikovsky, Chopin and Björk, describing the show as 'a mind-bogglingly complex audio-visual hallucination'.
The Evening Standard highlights the seamless integration of live and recorded footage, and Erivo's 'ethereal voice' in the final scenes. It notes that it's refreshing to see Erivo own her queerness on stage, licking her lips as a lace-decked Lucy in sexual thrall to an androgynous Dracula.
But the Daily Telegraph is less impressed, stating that despite Erivo's charisma, 'if you agree to tie your big comeback to a very specific directorial vision, there's not much even a superstar actor can do if that vision is faulty'. The review criticises the show as 'frustratingly short on dash and drama'.
