Review
INNOCENT BLOOD
Vertigo Mystery Theatre
Starring Natascha Girgis, Esther Purves-Smith, Robert Klein, Gail Hanrahan and Kathryn Kerbes
Written by Nicole Zylstra
Directed by John Paul Fischbach
Runs until June 13
Vertigo Playhouse (Tower Centre)
Is it still possible to stage a vampire play without having it look ridiculous?
Let’s face it, at this point the vampire genre is pretty much a lifeless corpse with all the juicy blood sucked out of it. I mean, even Angel has given up the ghost. Nonetheless, Vertigo Mystery Theatre has chosen to première a new, straight-faced dramatization of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, the 1872 horror classic that prefigured Dracula.
And there are times when it just about works. Calgary playwright Nicole Zylstra’s loose adaptation, dubbed Innocent Blood, alters a great many details and provides a new twist ending, but retains the mystery of the original and builds on its surprising eroticism. John Paul Fischbach’s production, meanwhile, features some genuinely eerie special effects, as well as a great gloomy, blood-drenched design motif to put you in the mood.
But those advantages are undercut by actors using silly accents and by an even sillier conceit – a vampire who bursts into song before taking a bite out of her victim. You could say she sings for her supper.
Whenever Natascha Girgis’s alluring villainess launches into one of Danielle Franch’s spooky songs, you feel like we’ve switched to Carmilla: The Musical. And, even though Girgis is a terrific singer, the effect is so cheesy that it scuttles whatever hope there was of taking the show half-seriously.
Then again, maybe that’s already a lost cause as soon as the other actors open their mouths. The worst offenders in the bad accent department are the putatively English characters: Esther Purves-Smith as the naïve young heroine Lara, Robert Klein as her father, Dr. Ellis, and especially Gail Hanrahan as her governess, Miss Bell. Purves-Smith’s Lara lays on the upper-class vowels with a trowel, sounding as though her previous governess was Dame Judi Dench. Klein’s accent, meanwhile, is so thinly applied that the original Canadian keeps poking through. But Hanrahan offers the most unwitting entertainment, her Miss Bell sounding by turns Irish, cockney and even Scottish. The character may be an anglophile, but her accent certainly gets around.
Ironically, when Eastern European vampires Girgis and Kathryn Kerbes turn up disguised as mother and daughter at the Ellis’s estate, speaking in the requisite Bela Lugosi inflections, their accents actually sound more authentic. They also give the most enjoyable performances. Girgis in particular is a suitably languid and darkly sensual Carmilla, more Theda Bara than Vampira, and gratifyingly subtle – well, as subtle as you can get when you’re playing a Victorian lesbian vampire, and a musical one at that.
Unfortunately, her lover-cum-victim doesn’t measure up. I never thought I’d be writing this, but the perennially girlish Purves-Smith is finally too old for a role. Although she does a great job of swooning – she has the knee-buckling down perfectly – her Lara is too headstrong and mature to be an innocent little virgin, and she’s cursed with a massive wig of golden curls that makes her look like a fugitive from a Restoration comedy.
Klein’s doctor is passable but dull and Hanrahan’s complaining governess becomes tiresome, but the cast isn’t the real problem here. If director Fischbach wanted audiences to suspend their disbelief, he should have axed their unnecessary accents and put a stake through Carmilla’s numbers – French’s songs would work better as entr’acte and transitional music.
On the other hand, his design team of Scott Reid (set), Pierre Marleau (lighting) and Linda Leon (costumes) deserve a bouquet of blood-red roses, or maybe a round of bloody marys, for the production’s heavy gothic atmosphere and clever sanguine colour schemes. And make that a double for Marleau, whose superb lighting is rich in details, from the flickering of an unseen fire on a hearth to the glistening of blood as it spills from an opened vein. Bloody good work. |
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