The new work "Dracula" by the main creative team of the blockbuster British drama "Sherlock" has just been launched, a total of three episodes, which is not particularly stunning overall, but at least not tacky. Simply put, the play is about what would count Dracula do if he came to modern London from victorian times? How does he treat himself? What choices will he make in the face of external pressure?
Stills from Dracula.
Similar to Sherlock, it's a story about Dracula the Vampire Count and Van Helsing, a close rival who kill each other. Van Helsing and Sherlock in this play are very similar, equally intelligent and squeal, in order to solve the case; Count Dracula and Professor Moriarty are similar, except that in this story, the villain Count Dracula is heavier and richer than the decent hero Van Helsing. Most importantly, the show doesn't have a tacky attempt to whitewash Count Dracula from beginning to end, and in the words of screenwriters Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, they portray Dracula as "their own evil hero."
The evil hero is undoubtedly cold and brutal, and at the same time he has a sense of humor. He was sophisticated, had his own philosophy, and had his own cowardice and sincerity; he lived for hundreds of years, maintaining an aristocratic standard of living and a much higher-than-average level of intelligence, but he still had a major misunderstanding of himself—he looked almost like Camus's characters except as a vampire earl.
One of the best things about this version of Dracula is that it doesn't vulgarize the story or the characters in it at all—it doesn't seem like a high standard, but it doesn't do much, even though there are countless vampire-themed movies and TV series. The vampire protagonist in the Twilight series of movies is basically a self-loathing vegetarian middle class, and Hollywood has brought in a lot of good-looking teenagers to make a bunch of vampire-themed romance idol dramas.
Even a famous director is not immune. For example, "Dracula", released in 1931 and directed by tod Browning, the originator of the horror film, and "Four Hundred Years of Thrilling Love", released in 1992 and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, are both adapted from the same novel, "Dracula" published in 1897. In Dracula (1931), the image of Count Dracula was cast as a flattened horror label, a supernatural monster of pure evil. To a certain extent, "Four Hundred Years of Thrilling Love" also idealizes and vulgarizes the whole story and the characters in it, portraying Count Dracula as a kind and pious lover, and carefully filtering out the evil and animal nature belonging to vampires.
Dracula in this play is the only male protagonist who truly combines the elegance of the nobility, the intellectual understanding of civilization, and the cruelty of animalism. And in this story, Dracula is unique, there is no vampire community in this world, and only the presence of his old rival Van Helsing saves him from absolute loneliness. Although the time and space have changed, this version of Count Dracula is the most in line with the spirit of the original.
Dracula and Van Helsing in different eras in this play.
The original novel Dracula, published in 1897, was written by Bram Stoker, who was born into a middle-class family in Dublin and later moved to London to work as an agent for a famous theatre actor while also continuing to write. His other works were usually completed quickly, and only this Dracula took seven years to write.
In Victorian literature, female characters are generally thin and facetious, either "angels of the family", pious and docile virgins, or lascivious snakes and scorpion women, "crazy women in the attic". Stoker, on the other hand, portrays many women in his novels who are more sane, more composed, and more profound than men.
This may be because Stoke's mother and his close friends were pioneers of the Victorian feminist movement, advocating that women should have the right to employment and political participation. In his novel, Stoker recorded the invisible repression of women at that time, and also used the image of women in his writing to refute the prejudice of mainstream Victorian society against women.
Count Dracula in Stoke's writing is not only a different and elegant villain, he is also a liberator of women, liberating his "victims" from being repressed and enslaved, and thus deviating from the "normal" image of a virtuous wife and mother in accordance with traditional morality, becoming a debauched mad woman.
Given that the social background at the time of the original novel no longer exists, the current general audience cannot understand, or even if there is some understanding, it does not care about the social psychological subtext implied by the original novel. So the creative team of this TV series gave up excessive ambition and just concentrated on telling a good story.
In this version of the play, a woman is directly arranged to play the role of Van Helsing, practicing the female meaning that the original author wants to embody. She is also doing the work of a heroic detective in the play, and she is interested in studying everything about Dracula and willing to give up her life to save others. She and Dracula fell in love and killed each other, from the monasteries of Eastern Europe in 1897 to the ships to England, and then to the modern London, and finally truly understood Dracula, and found that under his cold, penetrating and unbridled appearance, there was still cowardice and emptiness.
The words that the author of the original novel cannot declare in his mouth become playful dialogue in the mouth of the protagonist in this play. Van Helsing, for example, said, "Faith is a sleeping pill for children and fools," while Dracula half-jokingly said that he was afraid of the cross because it was a symbol of oppression and slavery, and that he drank the blood of peasants who had long been enslaved by Christianity, so he was infected with their fear. Between light ridicule, the focus of this drama has quietly switched to the theme that modern audiences pay more attention to. For example, the nothingness of existence.
□ NIXY Wang Chun (Drama Critic)
Beijing News Editor Wu Longzhen Proofreader Wei Zhuo