Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Here’s a show that seeks a whole new meaning for the phrase “biting satire”. This amiably ridiculous spoof of Bram Stoker’s classic Gothic horror drew first blood in a successful off-Broadway staging in 2023. Now Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors, written by Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen, flutters into the diminutive Menier theatre: 90 minutes of knockabout comedy, in the style of Monty Python or Mel Brooks. A cast of five, plus wigs, hurtles through the story, mashing up Victoriana with Rocky Horror in a modern gender-bending take. Presiding over the whole affair is James Daly’s wickedly hot, pansexual vampire. His Count is toothsome and he knows it, first arriving, rock-god-style, in tight leather trousers and a black lace bolero jacket — which he soon discards, the better to reveal his rippling torso and biceps (a diet of B+ clearly works wonders). Daly finds a rich vein of comedy in his character’s arrival in Victorian Whitby, swooping through a window in a swirl of cape, brandishing a Wedgwood cake stand (pastry recipe from Marie Antoinette’s pâtissier) along with a glint of fang. But while he revels in Dracula’s predatory slyness, there’s also a streak of melancholy to him: being undead is kind of lonely, it turns out.Around him, in Greenberg’s energetic staging, the remaining cast juggle puns, slapstick and comically inflated parts. Charlie Stemp brings sharp timing to the naive Jonathan Harker, here a rather prissy estate agent who finds his blood pumping when Dracula slinks on to a sofa alongside him. Safeena Ladha as his smart fiancée Lucy (in this version, she, rather than her sister Mina, is engaged to Harker) is likewise tempted by the Count’s full-blooded approaches.Sebastien Torkia, meanwhile, hams it up hugely as Mina, a sex-starved singleton in ringlets and crinolines, and as the formidable German doctor, Van Helsing. Battiest of all is Dianne Pilkington’s double turn as both stuffy Dr Westfeldt (the girls’ father) and one of his eccentric patients, which at one point obliges Pilkington to hurl herself out of a window and turn up dressed as the other character almost instantly — deservedly drawing a round of applause.Some of the gags are pretty anaemic and there’s little in the way of substance to sink your teeth into. A moral of sorts about selflessness and living your life to the full only surfaces briefly, and it never feels as if there is much at stake. Best, perhaps, not to reflect too deeply but just to roll with the epic silliness of it all.★★★☆☆To May 3, menierchocolatefactory.com
