Confessions of a Lunatic
As distressed string fugues puncture the air, the atmosphere urgent and turbulent, the black stage is bathed in blood red light, bare save for a single bench atop which sits an iron bucket, the cell of Robert Renfield in the Royal Dundee Lunatic Asylum, August 1893, he confined here under the care of Doctor John Seward who has been unable to successfully treat him in any way, instead taking notes of his ravings, the confessions of a lunatic.
A four-handed production directed by Ian Dunn, Confessions of a Lunatic stars writer Lewis Mullan as Renfield and Aydan MacDonald as Seward, strutting about the stage in tweed, with Elliot Shaw as Lucy Westenra who turned down Seward’s hand in marriage but still visits and has befriended his inmate, and Arzaneira Deepsri as Countess Dracula, lounging in rich burgundy velour, seen only by the man she wordlessly controls.
The merging of the characters of Mina Murray and Lucy common in adaptations of Dracula in order to streamline the narrative, so does this merge Jonathan Harker and Renfield, more radical than Herzog’s solution to bring him to Dracula’s attention by having him as Harker’s employer, and as a character who has no voice while others record their thoughts in letters or typed records he is essentially a blank slate, much of his dialogue here recounting Harker’s account of his travels alongside his zoophagous obsessions.
The costumes impeccable, while it befits those who visit or haunt him in pristine white shirt and conspicuously well-groomed Renfield does convince as the unwashed inmate of a Victorian asylum, nor does Seward’s snooty disdain carry the authority of his position, the staging often limited to the players pacing back and forth in the cell but coming to ghastly life during the increasingly frequent nightmare sequences, a play of lies and flies and bargaining with death that is more confessions to a lunatic, Lucy’s admissions taking her often shallow upright lady of society into a new place of depth and vulnerable frustration.
Confessions of a Lunatic has now concluded its run at theSpace on the Mile
