David Suchet as Van Helsing

Dan Stevens as Lord Holmwood

Sophia Myles as Lucy

David Suchet

For someone who has never read Bram Stoker's Dracula, this presentation of Dracula will, no doubt, be a fairly good piece of home entertainment. It captures the 19^th Century's Victorian manner quite well, and a generation unused to subtlety, it won't miss the subtle Victorian sexual undertones with which Stoker infused his tale. Since so many Generation X-ers do not care much for serious reading, they will probably find this to be the genuine product, and they will have no problems with the needless, in-the-buff, sex scene between Dracula and Lucy. But, for someone who knows the novel well there are just too many changes—most for the worse—to make this a top-notch viewing experience.

Sadly, this new Dracula offers little of Stoker's original. Which, of course, contradicts the BBC's claim that script writer Stewart Harcourt "returned to the original novel" for inspiration and even drew on "elements of Bram Stoker's own life and Victorian society to give this version of the vampire classic a new, modern sensibility." Well, maybe he did go to the novel for inspiration, but he certainly only took the bare elements and then created his own fantasy. As for the modern sensibility, we can really do without it. But, then Harcourt is also the script writer for several of the new [Miss] Marple stories co-produced by UK's ITV and PBS, which have been consistently savaged by all of the script writers used to produce this series in the name of 'modernization'. Spare me!

So, while I can recommend this DVD for its quality of reproduction and sound, and while this 'revisionist' tale of Dracula makes good light entertainment, my personal curmudgeon has surfaced, which must be quite obvious. It is an old refrain that readers, familiar with my ideas about theater, know only too well. It runs like this, "Why do script writers and directors feel the need to put their own stamp on a perfectly good tale, or play?" I do not mind modernization where it fits, but a complete change of story does not sit well with me.

True, it will be almost impossible to present a play in diary form, the genre in which Stoker chose to write his novel. But there is nothing to prevent the script writer or the director from insuring that the characters are true to the novel, and that the path of the story, as set down by the writer of the original work, is followed truthfully.

Some of the changes that take place in this Dracula, in which much is made of syphilis—Stoker never mentions the word in his tale—diminishes two of the leading characters, Dr. Van Helsing and Jonathan Harker, and several important characters are missing. Where is the faithful friend, Quincy Morris, and where is Renfield? The latter is an important figure in the original story, who in some ways helps to tie things together. The only aspect left of him in this new TV Dracula is his final fate, having his neck wrung by Dracula, which also befalls some of the new characters, who have entered this production in a curious way.

While it makes fun entertainment to invent a dark brotherhood in Victorian London that is in league with Dracula, a la Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, it totally changes the focus of the story. Then there is the syphilis. If Lord Holmwood (Dan Stevens) really caught the disease from his mother at birth (courtesy of his father's adulteries), as we are informed early in the story, his doctor would surely have noticed that at once, or at least, the disease would not have lain dormant for 20-odd year. When this future husband of Lucy's (Sophia Myles) discovers his unlucky fate, the disease makes its appearance in the wrong manner. Was there no medical adviser attached to this production?

Why is Jonathan Harker (Rafe Spall)—the only one ever to escape from Dracula's abode in the novel—eliminated in the very beginning of this tale, when he should be one of the main characters who went about destroying this evil incarnation of the > living dead= ? And, oh, what have they done to Prof. Van Helsing (David Suchet)? In the novel he is one of Europe's great physicians, who comes to the aid of Dr. Seward (Tom Burke), who is unable to solve the mystery of Lucy's strange illness on his own. They have turned the good professor into a cowering vampire hunter, who is a captive of the brotherhood. I won't reveal how he manages to escape their clutches, but let it be said that Suchet, who was so great in the Poirot mysteries, was badly served in the Van Helsing role.

There is some fine interacting between friends and Harker's fiancée, Mina (Stephanie Leonid as). They are good friends and the scene at the cemetery at Whitby, in which the graves are empty because the headstones represent those lost at sea, is well played out. What one wonders, however, how come Dracula can appear to them at daytime as a charming, though rather solemn young man in what appears to Mina, Harker's clothing. Vampires are night creatures. Marc Warren plays Count Dracula with considerable restraint, but he, too, is not well served in this film.

One thing that is especially badly served in this TV version of Dracula is the sea voyage that the count makes from Transylvania to Britain, where the ship is beached during a storm at Whitby. In the novel the skipper of the vessel left a great log stuffed in a bottle in his pocket that describes the strange happenings during the voyage. This could have been wonderfully exploited by the script writer.