For the past thirty years, breakthroughs in video and sound technology have, for better or worse, seeped into live performance. For better in the case of Kip William’s production of Suddenly Last Summer and Lindy Hume and Dave Bergman’s Winterreise for Musica Viva. For worse with David Livermore/Opera Australia’s ludicrous Anna Bolena and Ivo van Hove’s self-indulgent All About Eve. With Dracula, Williams’s final production as the Sydney Theatre Company’s Artistic Director and his completion of a trilogy of horror, which included his hugely commercially successful The Picture of Dorian Gray and his somewhat less triumphant Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Williams reaches what one hopes is his technical apogee.

As before, cameras follow the actor, in this case Zahra Newman, around the stage, and her image is projected onto screens through which she interreacts with filmed images of herself playing other characters. If we can drag our eyes away from the screen, we can see her being eased out of and into wigs and costumes before she reappears on camera. For most of the production, the stage is treated as though it were the wings, and pretty much all the action happens above the stage on the ever-present screen.

Technically, this works extraordinarily well and all credit must go to the crew, especially video designer Craig Wilkinson and video editor Susie Henderson. Marg Horwell’s design, Nick Schlieper’s lighting, and Clemence Williams’s music are all up to their usual high standards. But, as the lawyers would say, cui bono?

Certainly not Newman, alas. As Kip Williams points out in his notes, Dracula differs from his previous two ventures into horror in that there is no dominant protagonist. For most of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula is an evil off-stage presence and the story concentrates on a disparate group desperately attempting to track him down and destroy him. So Newman doesn’t have one focal character from whom she could occasionally deviate, but has to switch constantly. As she whisks through outfits at the speed of light, the impression is almost that of a child playing with the contents of a costume box in the attic. This is not helped by the fact that she has no time to develop any of the people she is playing with anything more than a look or an accent. Williams’s script is, at least until the very end, more or less taken verbatim from the novel, which, being epistolary, is rather verbose. To keep the show moving, Newman speaks at a speed that, delivered by a less technically adroit actor, would have turned into gabble. As it is, for those unfamiliar with the novel, there is much that is unclear.

Zahra Newman as Mina and camera operators Lucy Parakhina and André Morton (photograph by Daniel Boud)

Because the plot moves at such a pace, the technical wizardry is emotionally distancing and the characters are so thinly drawn we cannot empathise with them. It is impossible to build any of the tension required in horror stories. On the opening night, much that one presumes was meant to cause a shudder was greeted with laughter.

All of which makes one wonder when does the ‘live’ in a live performance become so subservient to the technical that it almost ceases to be what one would call theatre. This is in no way to belittle Newman’s achievement, but given that her performance was directed for the most part to a camera and not directly to the audience, are we losing what makes theatre unique?

Newman is no neophyte as far as one-actor shows are concerned. In 2019, backed only by a few projections, a laser display and a Humphrey B. Bear costume, she gave one of the most outstanding performances this reviewer has seen, recreating Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright. This worked because it went back to the basics of the theatre: Not exactly Lope de Vega’s two boards and a passion, but the simple fact of a person on a stage directly telling a story to a group gathered there to listen.

The irony of Williams’s production is that in his admirable desire to incorporate modern technology to enhance the theatrical experience he has overloaded the effects to the detriment of the work. As the evening dragged on and on, one realised that Williams had achieved the improbable: he had taken a major work of horror fiction, assembled an extraordinarily talented crew and one of the country’s leading actors, and created an evening of debilitating tedium.

At the play’s conclusion Newman, in the character of Dracula, sauntered to the front of the stage to deliver the moral of the piece and then began to chant. Suddenly, there was a riveting connection between actor and audience, and at long last the performance came alive.

Dracula (Sydney Theatre Company) continues at the Roslyn Packer Theatre until 4 August 2024. Performance attended: 6 July.