A Comedy of Terrors review: ‘a hoot’

Charlie Stemp as Jonathan Harker Photo: Matt Crockett[Missing Credit]

“You will be horrified,” he warns before the show starts in earnest – earnest Victorian melodrama being the target of its unashamedly broad humour. “That is, horrified one way or another,” he adds.

Stemp’s English twit of an estate agent Jonathan Harker is soon rattling across Transylvania in a horse-drawn carriage to sell a certain count some choice London properties. But once Dracula has seen the succulent neck of Harker’s fiancée Lucy (Safeena Ladha), he prefers to take possession of something a little more warm-blooded than bricks and mortar.

The gag about Janet Street-Porter’s teeth was presumably inserted by a British member of the team to replace one deemed too American

After the action sails via shipwreck to the Yorkshire manor where Lucy lives with her bonkers psychiatrist father Dr Westfield you half expect someone to sing the title song from Brooks’s High Anxiety. Greenberg, who recently directed Stephen Schwartz’s The Baker’s Wife on this very stage, must have considered making this show a musical. Perhaps one day he will. But in the meantime this version has its own pleasing, roughly hewn feel to it.

The one-liners occasionally lack bite. The gag about Janet Street-Porter’s teeth was presumably inserted by a British member of the team to replace a joke that was thought too American. Yet on the whole the evening never stops being funny even if the plot loses momentum.

Dianne Pilkinton stepping off stage as Westfield and immediately back on as his psychopathic patient Renfield is as funny the tenth time as it is the first. Sebastien Torkia as Lucy’s relentlessly sex-obsessed sister is also worth a mention. But Daly’s athletic Dracula is one of the comedy performances of the year. A hoot.

Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors

Menier Chocolate Factory

★★★★