Mina Harker has a problem. Well, actually, she has two problems. First, her new husband is far away in Transylvania, trying to make a real estate deal with a reclusive foreign noble. His communications have been scattershot, at best. Second. her best friend Lucy has not been well at all. Weird things are going on, from a recently wrecked ship with no crew and boxes full of dirt, to a dubious doctor, a questionable professor, and things that are going slowly from bad to worse.
This is Robin Ahern’s adaptation of Dracula, an Audible full cast production.
Dracula, by Bram Stoker, is a public domain work, which means anyone can adapt it, remix it, or use it in any way. This can be a double-edged sword, especially when it comes to trying to find the original, but remixes, reinterpretations, and readaptations can explore forgotten corners, or reveal new ideas and new perspectives. For example, Robin D. Laws and Kenneth Hite used the Dracula book as a template for The Dracula Dossier, which takes the text and annotates it as an after-action report on a failed attempt to recruit Dracula for British occult secret service work. Dracula Daily and Cryptic Canticles provide the epistolary texts of Dracula based on the day and date they exist in the novel. And of course movies of Dracula have put him everywhere from the contemporary Victorian day of the novel all the way to the present and beyond.
Robin Ahern’s Dracula is an audio full-cast production with Ella Purnell, Jonathan Bailey, Aimee Lou Wood, Louis Partridge, David Jonsson, and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Aside from the star power of the production, audio full-cast radio plays of Dracula are nothing new. Orson Welles did it with his Mercury Theater on the Air—in fact it was his first production, 3 and a half months before he did “The War of the Worlds.” Where Ahern differs radically from the text and from prior productions like Welles’ is that the focus is on Mina Harker. We stay with her as a character in the scene for much of the time except where it is impossible to do so (for example, the Jonathan Harker scenes in the castle). The importance of Mina and Lucy to the story are emphasized and foregrounded. We see throughout the work that the female characters get more airtime and more centrality to the narrative than we get in most adaptations of Dracula.
The audio production is well done, and the voice actors for the most part do an excellent job in their roles. In particular, given her centrality, Ella Purcell’s voice acting as Mina is quite good, as is Aimee Lou Wood’s as Lucy. We have Jonathan Bailey as Dracula, a good choice to voice the Count. Throughout all of their portions, I was most reasonably entertained, aurally and otherwise by the production.
The problems with the production and the entire exercise, however, come quickly into play. And some of it is, I think, the production/writers attempt to further modernize Dracula. Instead of enhancing the material, however, it left me frustrated as a reader/listener. Let’s start with Professor Van Helsing, who in this adaptation is a genderflip and played by Maggie Gyllenhaal. She is clearly meant to be the “get” of the audio production. There are, as I see it, two major problems with how this works, though.
First, while all the other actors and actresses show warmth, engagement and enthusiasm for their characters, Gyllenhaal is the exception. To my ear, she comes off bland, flat, and unaffecting. There are perhaps maybe one or two scenes where she rises above the flat intonation she has brought to the character, but otherwise listening to her was grating on my ears. It felt like she was in a different style of production entirely. And given the passion Van Helsing has in most adaptations, this Van Helsing is unique, but not freshly and pleasantly, to my ears.
And then there is the idea of a female Dr. Van Helsing in the first place. When she is introduced and meets Dr. Seward, Dr. Seward is shocked and surprised (and I think we the audience are meant to be as well) that Van Helsing is a woman. His incredulity fades but it changes the dynamic of the forces against Dracula by having Van Helsing be so wrong-footed to begin with.
There is a term in SFF called queernorm, where the presence and existence of queer characters in that world are a given and not remarked upon. Queerness is naturally accepted in anyone without even an eyebrow raised about their sexual preferences. I am going to propose a similar word, gendernorm. In a gendernorm world, the roles and occupations of people are not tied to preconceptions of their gender in that time and place. In a gendernorm world set in Victorian times, a woman could be a professor without issue, or, say, have female Roman Empresses in and among the male Emperors, or female US Presidents in the modern era.
This version of Dracula *could* have gone whole hog and gone in for a gendernorm world, and I think that would have been interesting. If you are already going to bend Victorian conceptions of gender by having a female Dr. Van Helsing, you might as well, I feel, make it a gendernorm world. I think the dynamic of the book would have been stronger for it. Instead we get this utterly unexplained and “jaw-dropping reveal” that Dr. Van Helsing is a woman, and then it only undercuts the story rather than doing anything useful with it.
And then there is the endgame of this production, which is at odds with the book. If you will remember, the protagonists move to cut off Dracula before he gets home in the original story, especially since they fear that he will be too powerful if he gets back to the Castle. In this story we instead get a climatic confrontation at the Castle itself, even as we have been told in the narrative multiple times that it is an extraordinarily bad idea. The group DOES win, but it feels more like a eucatastrophic Victorian version of the Ravenloft D&D setting than anything that has gone before in the book. Having the protagonists searching for Dracula’s coffin in the basement of Castle Dracula might on its surface feel more dramatic than the events of the original novel, but given everything we have had happen and establish, it feels discordant.
There are other changes to the Dracula universe as established here. We get a couple of short scenes of Lucy and Mina as children together. This goes back to emphasizing the female characters in the original and bringing them more depth and light. Similarly, Jonathan Harker in this production is more than a bit of a drip. While he is not an aggressive action hero in most Dracula adaptations, in this one, Jonathan time and again does NOT want anything to do with chasing Dracula and wanting to leave the whole thing alone. This weak-willedness also extends to the early parts of the book, where Dracula emotionally bullies him in a way that is quite more severe than in the novel. For compression reasons, too, Quincey Morris is excised from the narrative.
There is also an unusual suggestion in the narrative, that I can’t find paralleled in other Dracula media that I’ve ever encountered, that Dracula has been to England before. That this entire exercise is a return of sorts. He isn’t moving to a completely new land, it is one that he has been to centuries before. This idea is interesting, but just how Dracula would have managed an earlier visit to England (and then back again!) is a rather thorny question. I can think of a way that it might have worked, but this adaptation removes his connection and background with the Romany.
I came to wanting to listen to this adaptation to consume Dracula, a well worn and well known tale to me, in a different way. Instead, I came away frustrated and feeling that, quite frankly, I wasted 6 hours of my time that I could have been listening to something else. I cannot recommend this to anyone—especially not to lovers of the original, and not to people who have never read Dracula and want to start with something fresh.
