Review: West Australian Ballet's 'Dracula'

Krzysztof Pastor’s Dracula has returned to West Australian Ballet with a new generation in its fangs and a production that still knows exactly where to place its bite. First created for the company in 2018, this gothic ballet is busy by design, moving through ten scenes across Transylvania and England, with castles, drawing rooms, cemeteries, an asylum and a final confrontation all folded into its theatrical machinery. That it remains legible is one of its great strengths. Pastor and librettist Pawel Chynowski keep Bram Stoker’s story moving at pace, allowing atmosphere to serve the narrative rather than cloud it.

On Saturday evening, the production sat handsomely inside His Majesty’s Theatre, whose red-lit façade set the scene before the curtain rose. Phil R. Daniels and Charles Cusick Smith’s sets and costumes give the ballet its visual appetite: velvet, stone, candlelight, white nightgowns, black capes and the heavy architecture of Victorian dread. Jon Buswell’s lighting sharpens the world further, shaping corridors of danger and moments of supernatural interruption. The movement between scenes was impressively seamless, an important achievement in a ballet so dependent on shifts of place, time and psychological temperature. 

Wojciech Kilar’s score, originally written for Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, is used here with conviction. Arranged for the ballet by Michael Brett and Joshua Davis, and performed with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra under Jessica Gethin, it brings cinematic scale without overwhelming the dancers. Its dark repetitions and sudden surges give the production its pulse, allowing Pastor’s choreography to move between courtly formality, erotic threat and contemporary unease.

Charles Dashwood gave a commanding performance as Young Count Dracula. The choreography does not always give him the full range to display the extent of his obvious gifts, yet he still made the role magnetic: slick, controlled and dangerous, with an elegance that carried menace rather than merely presenting it. His pas de deux with Juan Carlos Osma’s Jonathan Harker, after Harker suffers a paper cut and Dracula is overwhelmed by the sight of blood, was one of the evening’s most charged encounters. It is an unusual and highly effective male/male pas de deux: predatory, intimate and electrically tense, with the dancers finding a dynamic that was neither coy nor overplayed.

Osma was a formidable Harker, and a crucial thread between the ballet’s Transylvanian and English worlds. He balanced the character’s formal, almost dutiful composure with the emotional and physical disorientation that overtakes him inside Dracula’s castle. His dancing had clarity and weight, but also a persuasive vulnerability, giving Harker’s ordeal more dimension than simple terror. It was a credible, finely judged performance, and one that helped hold the narrative line together.

Jack Whiter’s Old Count Dracula was a strong counterweight, and the interchanging between young and old Dracula was especially well handled. The first transformation arrived with genuine surprise. Later, even once the device was known, the choreography and staging sustained its charge, giving Dracula’s body a sense of unstable time.

Polly Hilton, doubling as Elizabeth and Mina, gave the ballet its emotional centre. As Mina, she held the stage with restraint, making her attraction to Dracula unsettling because it seemed to arrive against her own better judgement. Her early scenes with Osma’s Harker established the emotional stakes of the story clearly, giving the later disruption of their world its necessary force.

Alexa Tuzil was a standout as Lucy Westenra, giving one of the evening’s most vivid performances. Lucy can so easily become a plot function, the doomed friend, the pretty victim, the necessary turning point. Tuzil made her bright, sensual and then terrifyingly altered, tracing the character’s decline and transformation with precision. Her scenes with Arthur Holmwood, danced by Heath Kolka, had an affecting directness.

The Brides of Dracula, Dayana Hardy Acuña, Beatrice Manser and Glenda Garcia Gomez, were excellent. They gave the Transylvanian scenes their most potent physical texture: predatory, seductive and strange, never reduced to decorative excess. Pastor’s choreography for the vampire women understands the power of group timing, and the dancers executed it admirably.

The asylum scenes, centred on Ludovico Di Ubaldo’s Renfield, are among the production’s riskier inclusions. Narratively, they could easily have become superfluous, a gothic detour that loosens the main line of the ballet, especially for those unfamiliar with the source material. Instead, they provide one of its most striking physical worlds. The inmates, bound by their restraints, move with a collective tension that brings contemporary movement into the production without making it appear grafted on. Their group work was sharp, unsettling and theatrically disciplined, giving Renfield’s madness a social architecture rather than leaving him isolated as a grotesque.

Gakuro Matsui brought authority to Professor Van Helsing, while Brent Carson’s Dr Jack Seward added another thread of order attempting, with limited success, to hold back the supernatural. Indiana Scott’s Mrs Westenra was clearly drawn, and Jurgen Rahimi and Declan Daines, as the Phantoms, contributed to the production’s muscular, shadowed vocabulary.

Across the evening, what was evident was the company’s cohesion. This is a production with many moving parts, and West Australian Ballet handled its density with notable smoothness. The ensemble work had a polished ease, with dancers moving cleanly between spectacle, narrative detail and atmosphere. Even in the busiest scenes, the stage rarely looked cluttered; the company danced as though it understood the production’s internal rhythm.

For all its theatrical scale, Dracula works best when it trusts the dancers to carry its contradictions: desire and revulsion, elegance and violence, grief and appetite. It is an ornate production, and occasionally an overfull one, yet its best passages have good dramatic force. This revival confirms the ballet’s place as one of West Australian Ballet’s most distinctive large-scale works, a gothic classic that gives the company plenty to sink its teeth into.

-Olivia Weeks

Bonus Pointes

• Dracula’s slicked-back hair deserves its own credit line: immaculate, enviable and somehow immune to centuries of undead disruption.
• Elizabeth’s suicide in the prologue has the required melodrama, though the fall itself lacked a little gravity. For a death that sets the entire curse in motion, it needed more impact.
• Lucy’s red hair gave a faint echo of The Red Shoes’ Victoria Page, especially as her brightness began to tip toward doom.
• His Majesty’s Theatre, lit up in red, was the perfect venue for this gothic classic.