First, it was a vial. Then stained garments. By the end, a character was dripping with the stuff, glistening gorily from head to toe. But the bulk-buy fake blood was just one memorable element of this performance by Gothic Opera, opening this year’s Grimeborn festival. There were also canapes made from body parts, lots of dastardly cloak-sweeping and even more screaming, which ranged from the semi-orgasmic to the downright eerie but was mostly very, very silly.
Vampires tend to be these days, of course. Such is the legacy of Dracula, Hammer horror, Buffy and Twilight. More specifically, the hapless absurdity of the vampires in What We Do in the Shadows (2019) surely inspired this production’s updated English-language dialogue by Charles Ogilvie. “Plenty of blood, not enough bloody souls,” complains the Vampire Master as she delivers her ultimatum to Ruthven: three willingly-bitten virgins within 24 hours or it’s eternity in a plywood coffin for him. “Dost thou … get it?”
Heinrich Marschner’s 1828 Der Vampyr long predates this high-camp fangwork. An operatic rarity now, it was an early-adopter of the craze begun by John Polidori’s short story The Vampyre in 1819 and was a major success across Europe – until German Romantic opera’s whole brand of supernatural earnestness went out of fashion.
Gothic Opera describes its production – first seen in 2019 and directed by Julia Mintzer – as a “feminist retelling”. The Vampire Master of the original is now female, played with magnificent self-possession by contralto Gráinne Gillis. The dialogue features jokes about the patriarchy and how useless the male characters are. And those three virgins – initially wide-eyed and helpless – eventually take back control.
“I’m sure that didn’t happen in the original,” mused one punter behind me at the end. And it certainly didn’t. But the fact that Gothic Opera has managed to sell out multiple nights of this production, finding a way to make Marschner’s opera speak in 2024, is no mean feat.
Judicious cuts were crucial. Conductor Kelly Lovelady (heroically dynamic in the sweltering black box of the Arcola theatre) has arranged Marschner’s orchestral score for just four musicians, playing piano, cello, double bass and sousaphone. The ensemble imaginatively captures the dark timbre of Marschner’s original but inevitably it sounds bare at times. Underpowered, too, when the eight-strong cast were singing together at full tilt.
The quality of that singing – in German – was mixed, as was the German pronunciation. Giuseppe Pellingra’s Ruthven was warmly persuasive and Amber Reeves, Milena Knauß and Madeleine Todd assured as the three virgins. Most impressive was Gillis’s multitasking as chorus member, “dark mistress” and priest, her alto wonderfully earthy. There was no space in this production for the more serious, heartfelt elements of Marschner’s original. But what we got instead was undeniably enjoyable.
At Arcola theatre, London, until 17 August. Grimeborn opera festival 2024 runs until 28 September
