Imitating the Dog is a Leeds-based theatre company that “pushes the boundaries” between theatre and digital technology, said Nick Ahad in The Guardian. Its latest show is a bracingly inventive spin on Dracula in which a 90-year-old woman named Mina Harker turns up at a police station on New Year’s Eve in 1965 to confess to an unlikely 70-year killing spree.
To tell this strange tale, the three actors perform simultaneously for the audience and for cameras on stage, so that their images can be relayed to a giant projection screen and digitally treated to “make it look as though we are watching a graphic novel come to life”. With influences ranging from movies such as Sin City and TV dramas such as Sherlock, to graphic novels including Watchmen and Constantine, this is “theatre as intensely popular culture”. And the result is “never less than engaging”, and often thrilling.
As the piece develops, said Clive Davis in The Times, we realise that what we are seeing is an alternative history of the 20th century: Mina – the wife of the man who hunted down Dracula – is a “merciless proto-superhero waging war against vampirism by eliminating a gallery of political villains from Kaiser Wilhelm to Mussolini and Stalin”.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
In truth, it does become a bit convoluted at times. Yet the fusion of live action and video technology is “breathtakingly inventive”, the show “hypnotically” watchable, the details “exquisitely crafted” and the performances “impeccable”.
It’s the production’s style and swagger, more than the content, that makes this such a “compelling” piece of theatre, agreed Ron Simpson on What’s On Stage. Riana Duce is “remarkable” as Mina: “demure, passionate, aggressive, deeply troubled”; and Adela Rajnovic and Matt Prendergast play multiple other characters with great skill.
The play produces the “odd frisson of terror”, but this is not so much a horror story as an “alternative view of the death and afterlife of Dracula”; and as an alternative approach to live theatre, it is “totally exhilarating”. (Tours to Liverpool, Derby, Lancaster, Watford, Colchester and Salford.)
Leeds Playhouse until 9 Oct, then touring until 13 Nov (imitatingthedog.co.uk)
-
Glinda vs. Elphaba, Jennifer Lawrence vs. postpartum depression and wilderness vs. progress in November moviesthe week recommends This month’s new releases include ‘Wicked: For Good,’ ‘Die My Love’ and ‘Train Dreams’
-
‘The problem isn’t creation itself’Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
-
‘Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America’ and ‘Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary’feature The culture divide in small-town Ohio and how the internet usurped dictionaries
-
‘Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America’ and ‘Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary’
feature The culture divide in small-town Ohio and how the internet usurped dictionaries
-
6 homes with fall foliagefeature An autumnal orange Craftsman, a renovated Greek Revival church and an estate with an orchard
-
Bugonia: ‘deranged, extreme and explosively enjoyable’Talking Point Yorgos Lanthimos’ film stars Emma Stone as a CEO who is kidnapped and accused of being an alien
-
The Revolutionists: a ‘superb and monumental’ bookThe Week Recommends Jason Burke ‘epic’ account of the plane hijackings and kidnappings carried out by extremists in the 1970s
-
Film reviews: ‘Bugonia,’ ‘The Mastermind’ and ‘Nouvelle Vague’feature A kidnapped CEO might only appear to be human, an amateurish art heist goes sideways, and Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Breathless’ gets a lively homage
-
Book reviews: ‘Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity’ and ‘Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice’feature An examination of humanity in the face of “the Machine” and a posthumous memoir from one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, who recently died by suicide
-
The dazzling coral gardens of Raja AmpatThe Week Recommends Region of Indonesia is home to perhaps the planet’s most photogenic archipelago
-
Salted caramel and chocolate tart recipeThe Week Recommends Delicious dessert can be made with any biscuits you fancy
