DRACULA
Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff Bay
Sun 27 May
words: ROBIN WILKINSON
★★★☆☆
Cardiff, great though it is, can sometimes seem like a bit of a desert to the more pretentious cultural consumer among us. Flicking through yet another gig listings dominated by the great post-Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci Welsh Indie Diaspora you can find yourself idly fantasising about London’s Southbank Centre, no doubt currently basking in a retrospective of some eastern European film director, or something else reassuringly old and foreign.
Imagine my joy, then, on seeing that the Wales Millennium Centre was to host a screening of Todd Browning’s 1931 classic Dracula (old: check, black and white: check) with a live soundtrack provided by the Kronos Quartet led by Philip Glass (minimalist classical composer: check, worked with Bowie, Eno and David Byrne: check, check, check). I would have punched the air, had my arms not atrophied after doing nothing more strenuous during the previous decade than stroking my non-existent beard and flicking through copies of The Wire on my i-pad.
Glass’s task, in 1998, was to inject fresh blood into this cinematic classic by providing it with a score for the first time. As one of the first “talkies” it had previously featured few sound effects beyond the dialogue, dominated by Bela Lugosi’s goulash-rich Hungarian accent. It has to be said, it’s a mixed success.
On one level, the score increases the tension in a film whose editing – ponderous almost to the point of pastiche – could prove too slow to a modern audience. In an early, and not atypical, scene, the lawyer charged with overseeing Dracula’s UK property acquisition inches slowly through the Count’s dilapidated ancestral home, each step bringing him inexorably (and painfully slowly) closer to Dracula’s imperious glare and Bela Lugosi’s first immortal line: “I am Drac-u-la”. The score, more richly Gothic than Glass’ reputation for minimalism may suggest, ramps up the tension satisfyingly in a scene that might otherwise leave contemporary viewers with some sympathy for Dracula’s condemnation to eternal life.
However, on another level, Glass’ score is too intrusive to function as an accompaniment to the original film. With the dialogue retained – where perhaps subtitles would have been preferable, heavy though the price of losing Lugosi’s sonorous, somnambulant tones would have been – it’s often hard to decipher what’s being said over the relentless musical eddying of the Kronos Quartet, beautiful though it is.
The performance only truly succeeds when conceived as a new entity: not a conventional film score, but an extended musical/visual collaboration. Taken together, it’s not hard to have a fair idea what’s going on: the narrative will be familiar to most of the audience, and neither the visuals nor the music deal too much in subtleties. In a reverse act of vampirism, Glass has feasted on an immortal classic and created something new and unique.
