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.