Acclaimed poet and playwright Liz Lochhead's Dracula stays refreshingly close to Bram Stoker's classic novel.

Asked to adapt it by the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, she immersed herself in the book. 'After a sleepless night,' she writes in the Introduction, 'my hair was standing on end, what with the mad Renfield in his lunatic asylum eating flies and playing John the Baptist to his coming master... and with Lucy's description of her "dream" of flying with the red-eyed one above the lighthouse at Whitby, and Jonathan's "dream" of the three Vampire Brides' advances upon him and of their being repelled at the last minute by the furious Dracula...

'This was before I'd even got to the abducted children or "the loving hand" of Lucy's fiance staking her through the heart... or that shocking rape-like bit where, with Mina's newly-wed husband Jonathan asleep in a flushed stupor by her side, Dracula, at her throat, takes his fill of her life's-blood...

'Still, what really attracted me to the story was Rule One for becoming a vampire-victim: "First of all you have to invite him in."'

Liz Lochhead's stage adaptation of Dracula was first performed at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, in 1985.

Ideal for schools and drama groups, this Dracula is all the more chilling for the respect it shows for Stoker's original nightmare creation.

About the Author
Liz Lochhead is a poet, playwright, performer and broadcaster. Her original stage plays include Thon Man Moliere, Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off, Blood and Ice, Good Things and Perfect Days. Her many stage adaptations include Dracula, Moliere's Tartuffe, Miseryguts (based on Le Misanthrope) and Educating Agnes (based on L'Ecole des Femmes); as well as versions of Medea by Euripides (for which she won the Scottish Book of the Year Award in 2001), and Thebans (adapted mainly from Sophocles' Oedipus and Antigone). Her collections of poetry include Dreaming Frankenstein, The Colour of Black & White, A Choosing (Selected Poems), Fugitive Colours and True Confessions, a collection of monologues and theatre lyrics. She served a five-year term as Scotland's Makar, or National Poet, from 2011 till 2016, and was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, 2015. She won the Sunday Herald Scottish Culture Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017, and the 2023 Saltire Society Lifetime Achievement Award for her contribution to Scottish literature.

Reviews

'Despite remaining faithful to Bram Stoker's original, Lochhead's version grapples with contemporary preoccupations: gender roles, the horrors of the 20th century, the battles between faith and reason, madness and sanity, democracy and aristocracy... an erudite revisiting of a primal myth'

* The Stage *



Book Information
ISBN 9781848420298
Author Bram Stoker
Format Paperback
Page Count 96
Imprint Nick Hern Books
Publisher Nick Hern Books
Weight(grams) 116g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 7mm