Dracula 18

Rhythm Tempo

For Lucy I had to design two different rhythms and tempos: Vampire-Lucy rhythm-tempo, and Regular-Lucy rhythm-tempo. I shall detail the two separately.

Vampire Lucy

Vampire Lucy's tempo is slow. I like to imagine a big cat when I do her, like a tiger or a panther. Slow, seductive, deadly. It's actually a trick I use when trying to embody that sexiness is visualizing a tail stretching out from my coccyx. I imagine it moving as I move, I spent hours watching the cat that lives next door to me walking around and working out how it moves with it's tail. It's all in the spine. But the thing with Vampire Lucy is that her slow, measured tempo is deadly because in a flash she can be faster than light. Her rhythm is similar...slow and measured but unpredictable.

Regular Lucy

Regular Lucy was something I had fun building up contrast with. I had already made loads of decisions on Vampire Lucy's physicality, tempo, vocal tones and inflection and such the like, so this version of Lucy was more for contrast. I really wanted to be able to show the huge snap between the two woman, highlighting the change that Dracula induces. So all of my choices in terms of Tempo-Rhythm with Regular Lucy were made so as to highlight and contrast the choices I made for Vampire Lucy. Whilst V.L. is very slow and measures, R.L. is light and childish. I wanted her voice to have a quality much like I one I imagines Lolita having in Vladimir Nabokov's novel of the same name. Childish and lovely however somehow I wanted there to be a sharpness and an ordinariness in there. I will write a blog analyzing this comparison presently.
Regular Lucy is impatient and fast paced, she dances everywhere she goes on tiptoes and has a quality like a bird, flitting around the room but not in a panicked way. This is lovely to play, especially in contrast to the Vampire Lucy. I find it so interesting that I've chosen to have a bird and a cat as my examples for tempo-rhythm characteristics. Predator and Prey.

Dracula 17

Act 1, Scene 10 - Composite Scene

The last scene, Scene 9, ends with the vampire brides attacking in a clump at the center of the bottom half of the stage, the men slumped at the top of the stage with Jonathan stood, hypnotized, on the top step. Dracula is off stage.As the vampire brides attack, they begin to circle. Faster and faster they circle until they spin out, spiraling across the stage like a tornado. The whole cast spirals and swirls about the stage as storm sound effects come on over the top. We spiral into our final positions, sat across the stage in 3 lines, joining at the ends to form a triangle, with Renfield making the bottom right point, Lucy, Mina and Florrie making the bottom left point and Jonathan, still in Dracula's castle, making the top corner. We stay, sat in those positions with the storm noises gradually building, throughout most of the scene. We do start to moan, getting louder as the sound effects do, and when Renfield starts to say "Faster, faster, faster, faster, faster, faster, faster..." we stand, and rocking side to side on our feet as if on a boat that we're having trouble staying steady on, we carry on moaning like ghouls. Finally, after the final "Faster", Renfield shrieks "Faster!". At this all the sound cuts out, the whole cast bows to Dracula - who has been slowly walking down the steps throughout the scene - and collapse. Dracula collects Izzy-Lucy. He walks her up the steps, to where I am lying collapsed. The two of us are walked up the steps to the very top of the stage, we sit down side-by-side, the two versions of Lucy in an almost childlike picture, and Dracula wraps his arms around us, obscuring us form the audience's view. Blackout.

Act 1, Scene 11 - Heartwood House

Lucy character is transferred form Izzy to myself

From among the scattered bodies, Florrie stands up

"as if waking up at a party surrounded by mess with no idea where she is" - Andy

As Mina wakes up as well, Florrie talks to her and the Two Lucy's - Izzy and myself - stand up and face each other. The first line spoken by Lucy is said by both of us: "And the air this morning is so sweet you'd think it'd never get dark again." Then Izzy falls to the ground and the character is transferred. I step down to the bottom of the top set of steps and repeat the line, before walking down to meet the two other girls. The entire scene is conducted whilst surround by the bodies and intended to be very naturalistic, cutting a strange contrast between the normal, upbeat drama and the slightly morbid death that surrounds us. Perhaps this is a foreshadowing of what is to come,  symbolic of the troubles the characters are just about to face, as Dracula has just entered Whitby. 

I realised, whilst reading the scene, that Lucy is on her period.

Florrie: Miss Lucy, you alright? You does look pale.

Lucy:   Oh nothing! I've got a visitor. Must have come in         the night. ..my friend, my bloody friend

Mina:   The curse

Firstly, I find this interesting because it means that Dracula came to Lucy whilst she was on her period. It's both disgusting, morbid and somewhat appropriate. However I think that Liz Lochhead also put it in for another reason, which was to further impress the sexual themes in the play. Both the symbolism of what Dracula is - lust, temptation, sexual desires - and also the impress the metaphor of Dracula's "Bite" for sex. It's very interesting and a lovely detail. 

Another thing I noticed which I absolutely love is Lucy's line:

"And no whinging or the gentlemen will never treat us as equals!"

It's just a little detail, but it shows that Lucy is a feminist. Dracula is set in the late 1800's, several decades before suffrage began and almost a century before feminism even properly kicked in. Of course, this play was written by a female writer in the mid 80's, right in the middle of the new wave of female writers and during a period of huge focus on feminism and female equality. As a huge feminist this is just a small detail that I absolutely adore about Lucy, and it's something I want to highlight when I play her.

Dracula 16

Why are some scenes naturalistic and others not?

There have been artistic decisions throughout the play to have some scenes very naturalistic and others very unnaturalistic. Similarly there are some very dark, disturbing scenes and some very light hearted scenes. The reason for this is simple: contrast. If the play is exactly the same throughout, dark, unnaturalistic and extreme then the audience would become desensitised.  They wouldn't be as effected by the content of the play and it wouldn't be as effective. It can also be very boring to watch the exact same thing for 2 hours straight. 

The style and practices we're studying and incorporating in the play - Surrealism, Theatre of Cruelty and Antonin Artaud - mean that we can play around a bit. in naturalistic theatre you must rigidly stick to the style or the play would be thrown out of context and it just wouldn't work. In the styles we're using, however, you don't have to follow the rules so strictly, you can play around and mix things up.

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Act 1, Scene 8 - Heartwood House

This scene is very naturalistic, there is little action from the chorus. We do mimic Florrie - "Yes miss, no miss" - and whisper at her "You're not part of the family". This is to show the class distinction between her and the other girls. We put this in because Florrie is not in the original book, Liz Lochhead put her in for a reason. She represents a lot, particularly the class divide and the silliness of Mina and Lucy. We wanted to highlight this, and it also shows how we, the chorus, as part of what Dracula represents can get inside people's heads and draw out their insecurities and failings. This is something Dracula targets. 

When Lucy is talking to Mina and says "All this time and not a scrap of pen from Jonathan", Jonathan lunges from the crowd of lunatics holding him back. This is him trying to escape from Dracula, however we grab him and drag him back, cackling. As the scene is going on, a small group of the lunatics will be creeping down the stage menacingly. We want it to be so that as Florrie is left alone at the centre of the bottom of the stage, muttering to herself, you can see the creatures looming behind her. 

Finally, at the end of the scene, we (the lunatics) simply run, screaming and laughing, off-stage, and Florrie, Mina and Lucy also run off, leaving Jonathan alone on-stage to begin the next scene.

Act 1, Scene 9 - Dracula's Castle

We started off with lots of discussion on how we could do the beginning of this scene. The stage directions state: 

Jonathan is shaving. He has take up a wooden-backed mirror with handle from his luggage and has lathered up his face.

There have been questions throughout the devising of the play about whether or not to use props,and the group decided that unless a prop has significant symbolic meaning then it should be replaced by mime. There were some ideas about how we could represent the mirror then; some people suggested no need to show it, that Heta's acting would make it clear; others suggested using the entire group to show the mirror physically. However, the point was raised that we'd already had representation of a mirror before, in the opening scene with Lucy, and why not do the same thing? So we decided that the "other" Jonathan, Max, should be the mirrored image. The scene started off with Jonathan shaving, Max with his back to the audience so they can see the "real" Jonathan clearly. When the mirror shatters, Max runs off stage. 

When Jonathan, with the key given to him by Dracula, rushes to open the door, there is an outbreak of howling as he opens it and he snaps it shut. The howling then mutes to growling and Dracula exits, leaving Jonathan weeping Mina's name on the bottom step. Then the vampire brides music begins and in pairs, with the men entering from the left and the women from the right, a wedding procession starts. The women are vampire brides, seductive and deadly, and the men are almost zombie-like, entranced by them. Vampire Lucy is last, descending along, and Mina follows, falling asleep at the top of the steps - this is symbolic of her somewhat seeing the scene in her dreams back at Heartwood House.  

When all of the pairs have passed Jonathan and reached the bottom of the stage, spread in their groups, everyone reaches their left hand up to their necks, almost tenderly, and the men drop to the floor. The Vampire brides walk among the bodies, taunting Jonathan. there was some debate as to how we'd do this, as their are only 3 brides scripted. We originally decided to choose the three actresses who play Florrie, Mrs manners and Lucy be these brides, however we wanted the brides to show that it's not just the specific women, it's all women, and any person can become this. So we [the girls] split into three groups and share out the lines between the groups. Jonathan stutters "Who are you?" to which we reply teasingly: "Who? Who? Who?", circling him on the bottom step. Andy said that initially we were playing it too safe, to "nice", and that we needed to get into the roles. We aren't lovely, sexy girls, we aren't ourselves being sexy. these are like animals, they aren't human, they're beautifully terrifying. 

We wanted this scene to be big, as it's such an important scene in the play, and that the power of Vampire Lucy (Bride 3) and her hold over Jonathan had to be made huge. So we decided to add a lift. Izzy and Heta are both lifted in the same way and circle each other in these lifts, Jonathan reach for Lucy and Lucy drawing him in closer. When they are placed back in their original places the men drop to the floor and Lucy advances on Jonathan. She touches her body erotically, with the vampire brides behind her, mirroring her actions. She then reaches out for Jonathan and almost as she touches her neck she snatches her hand back, as if she's grabbed a rope around his neck and is pulling him in. As her "fangs" touch his neck, Dracula sweeps in and pushes her back. The vampire brides group together, hissing at him, and there is a confrontation. As Dracula leaves, he throws a bag on the floor at the centre of the stage for the brides. Inside there is the sound of a baby crying, a beat of silence, and then the brides attack.

Dracula 14

Scene 6 - Bedlam

We start off scene 6 in Bedlam, at night time, all of us slumped over - lunatics didn't have the luxury of beds, we sleep where we sit. It was fun doing this scene, moaning and wailing through nightmares, I gave my character a sort of straight jacket and wrapped my arms around my waist. The scene has a fantastic look about it, all of the lunatics wailing and moaning with Renfield at the very centre. When Renfield starts to sing "Who at Cock Robin, my head it throbbin', the sound of sweet sobbin', sobbin', sobbin'..." we all join in, screeching and cackling madly. By the final "Sobbin'", the noise has grown to a crescendo so that Nisbett has to shout to be heard. When Renfield smashes the plate of food out of her hands, we all react, waking up and laughing, then as Renfield spots the scuttling spider on the floor of the cell, we - the lunatics - mutate into the spiders ourselves. When Sophie says "...it's not nice, eating dead things", we lift up our hands and inspect them. The idea is that it's like we've got a trail of blood trickling down our wrist, we are fascinated by it and even slightly turned on by it. When She says the word "Necrophiliac", we slowly lick the 'blood' off our wrists. It's perverted and weird but it really shows off the perveted insanity of the play, the lunatics are completely given in to Dracula and all he represents. They aren't holding back on or suppressing any of their desires, this also ties in directly to Antonin Artaud's ideas which is why the lunatics and chorus work is so vital in the play. We could have decided to simply go off stage when we aren't actually performing, however the decision to incorporate the entire cast in every second of the play and use all of these ideas that I've been putting down is directly related to Artaud's ideas about ritual, releasing the double and being cruel to the Audience and the Actor.

The scene ends with us all, as a chorus, repeating Renfield's lines "Come into my parlor, sad the spider to the fly". It's sickening and scary, but for the girls Andy also wanted it to be sexual and perverse. Then, from spider positions, we slowly start moving our shoulders into the bat movements we went through with Siou in Movement. We slowly lift up, starting the movement from our spine and shoulders, rolling into our arms and rising as bats. We based our movement as a group on something similar to birds flying together, or a shoal of fish. Lots of individual journeys moving as one entity. We flow about the stage, from one side to another before surging up to the back of the stage and into our positions to begin the next scene.

Scene 7 - Dracula's castle

We start scene seven in the format shown above, myself in the position of the front left gargoyle, however our bodies start draped over the back steps. As the "doors" swing open, there is a beat before the two hounds rush forward at Jonathan, who lets out a yell, then sit in guard dog position. The doors and the draped bodies, in complicity, drop to their knees in a sort of bow (doors) and turn up and out (bodies) and the bodies transform into gargoyles. The gargoyles are sort of like the lunatics but frozen in terrified, pained expressions. Then Dracula is shown for the first time, stood at the top of the steps. It's a magnificent image, and the slow decent down the stairs is such a key, poignant part of the play. 

As Jonathan lingers before the threshold of the castle we all lean forward; it's Dracula's desire, he's compelling and willing Jonathan to enter and when Jonathan steps into the castle we all let out a sigh of satisfaction and return to our position. 

After Dracula has welcomed Jonathan, he claps his hands and summons supper. At this point the chorus scatters out into a semi circle, sitting in front of the audience facing in to the stage in a watchful pose, almost like animals waiting. There is very little action from us, with the attention in on the scene. This scene is very naturalistic, despite the completely unnatural drama at this point in the play. 

When Dracula mentions the "throng of your London crowds", we all get up and walk about the bottom of the stage, visualizing the Victorian city. This shows how Dracula has immersed himself in the English world without leaving his castle. It symbolizes both his supernatural ability to leave his physical world and join the rest of the world, a very scary ability, but also his presence in everyone. Everyone has parts of all that Dracula represents and embodies - temptation, evil, tabooed desires - and therefor is susceptible to him. We then go back to our horseshoe position.

Again, we get up and become werewolves when Dracula and Jonathan discuss them, circling Jonathan and growling. As Jonathan utters the words and Dracula translates them, we repeat: "ordog, pokol, stregioca, vrolok, vlkoslak". As we are about to pounce, Dracula ushers us away and we slink back to our place in the horseshoe around them. 

The scene ends with Jonathan hypnotized by Dracula and when Dracula exits one wave of the watchful creatures runs up the stage and grabs Jonathan, pinning him down on to the steps. Then another wave of the creatures rushes to the stage and sits, watching the audience and the front of the stage, and that it how the next scene begins. 

This is a very long scene, however due to the naturalistic nature of it there is not a huge amount of chorus work to set.

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Scene 4

In scene four Renfield is back in Bedlam being taunted by Nurse Grice. We return to our lunatic roles again, acting like dogs just as Renfield does. When Renfield spits water in Grice's face, we all react, cheering and cackling. Nurse Grice pushes Renfield down onto the front of the stage, and the lunatics as a group start to mirror What Renfield does as he monologues:

My master will bless you. He'll punish you! [point] My master is at hand [grab hand]. And I am here to obey his every command [bow].See the moon [twitch focus up to moon in the top right hand corner above the audience], Mr drinkwater, see how sweetly she sail, she wax once, she wane, and my master, my master her come again [fall to ground]. Oh yes [slowly look up], yes Nurse Grice, him come! And me? Me, I sit, I sit with my birds in the wilderness [pick up bird in right hand], pretty birds, little victims, pretty ones, how they do flutter! [eat bird] The struggling sacrifice, Nurse Grice, ain't it nice, [fall onto hands, glaring up at audience] that do quicken the heart, that give a little flutter...

 The final line, "That do quicken the heart, that give a little flutter" is said in chorus,in a violent whisper. We then descend back into madness and, laughing manically, move into the line along the back of the stage for the next scene. 

Scene 5

In scene 5 the chorus work is mainly reacting, we react when Jonathan starts to flirt with Mina, cupping her breasts and they exchange innuendo ridden banter, then as the bell strikes for lunch the entire chorus makes the "Gong!" sound. We generally sit at the back, watching in full lunatic mode, reacting with perverted giggles and screeches when Jonathan stutters over Florrie's offer of leg or breast (The chicken, sir, leg or breast?), any sexual references ("You can be my secretary") and we really react when Jonathan mentions the Count. This scene is very naturalistic and more for character and plot development of Mina, Lucy, Seward and Jonathan. Since they are the main protagonists of the play they must have developed characters that the audience can associate with and "root for". Therefor, symbolically, it's not as important as other scenes and our role as chorus is not as vital. 

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What did we do today?

Diagram of the stage layout for Bedlam.

Today we worked on the second scene, in Bedlam, where Renfield's character is introduced. First we started with the transition from the previous scene, where everyone goes from the line to 4 groups of mad people in the four corners of the stage with the front two groups having guards stood behind them. There are also two guards holding Renfield  with Seward stood in front of him. There are 5-10 seconds of chaotic insanity, with everyone acting as the mad people of the asylum (note - this is not our idea or perception of mad people, it is intentionally set to be Victorian ideas of madness) and then Max gives the sign to stop by screaming "SHUT UP!" 

We intentionally put in some chorus work to do with Renfield, like giving the chorus some of his lines so that we can represent how each mad person in the asylum is sort of like a side of Renfield. When Sophie (Renfield) starts screaming "Bedlam" the rest of the cast chorus it too, screaming the words three times before the guards raise their hands as if to strike and we flinch away and fall silent. When Sophie says "Screw Lucy" we start whispering and muttering "Lucy, Lucy, Lucy". When Renfield sees the fly, the entire cast starts to buzz and make the noise of the fly, slowly building the noise and matching her movements. 

We showed Andy and he gave us some constructive criticism and changed a few things. Firstly, he pointed out a bit where Renfield is singing the song about the lady who swallowed a fly:

There was an old woman who swallowed a fly,
I don't know why she swallowed a fly,
Perhaps she'll die.

There was an old woman who swallowed a spider,
That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her,
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly,
I don't know why she swallowed the fly,
Perhaps she'll die.

There was an old woman who swallowed a bird,
How absurd! to swallow a bird,
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider,
That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her,
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly,
I don't know why she swallowed the fly
Perhaps she'll die.

Andy wanted everyone to sing that song when Renfield does - as mad people - and he also added in a bit when Renfield is screaming "MY MASTER WHO I WORSHIP IS COMING IN HIS WARSHIP!" The entire chorus screams that with her. Her final line is "I don't want to want to let him in!" And when she's said that, the entire cast repeats it in a deadly whisper. We then start to laugh manically and transition to the next scene.

Scene three was fairly simple. Since it was just between Jonathan Harker and Seward we decided to go from the laughing transition to standing in three lines, creating three walls around the scene facing the two and when they shake hands and greet each other we all turn and face away. This makes a nice set, it seems to block the two off from the madness and chaos of Bedlam outside the walls of Seward's office, but we decided to keep in character ever so slightly, but stood in neutral. There are three points in the conversation when everyone turns and looks at the two talking, those are when they mention Mina for the first time, when Seward says "All a bit Gothic for my tastes" and when they mention Count Dracula. We finally turn when Jonathan says "Yield not to temptation", signifying one of the major themes of the play, and as they continue off we raise the volume until we're in full scale madness again.

Electric Shock Therapy/Electroconvulsive Therapy/Medical Science

In scene two we reference and also show use of Electroconvulsive therapy, more commonly known as Electric Shock Therapy. EST is usually used to treat depression, mania, schizophrenia and catatonia. It's use in the play is anachronistic, the play is set in the 1890's and EST was not introduced into medicine until the 1930's. I think that the play has hugely medicalised the Dracula legend, I think this is important in three ways:

1. It plays on the whole science vs. religion. Dracula/vampire lore in general ties in hugely with religion (crucifixes, holy water etc being used to repel vampires)and Bram Stoker was a Protestant himself, however Liz Lochhead's play is a far more modern interpretation of the tale so it's an interesting debate to throw in
2. Science being a modern this, this really shows the battle in the play between the modern and the ancient. This leads on to...
3. Medicine becoming a power in it's own rite. The electroshock therapy, the blood transfusions for Lucy, the opiates to sedate Renfield they are all used essentially to battle Dracula and so become a power themselves. Interestingly enough it's a matter the doctors and scientists, Seward and Van Helsing, trying to take hold control and the madmen and the women who often seem to be the ones in control, sometimes leaving the doctors powerless.