Adapting Dracula (Part Fourteen)

This is a series of posts sharing my ideas/considerations while getting ready to adapt Bram Stoker's novel Dracula for the live stage.

Fourteen: A Study in Adaption

Plenty of commentary on the BBC's Sherlock series wait to be read all over the internet (and elsewhere). Me, I'd like to note a few of the challenges faced, and how the show's creators answered them.

The essential premise, that of updating Arthur Conan Doyle's stories into the modern day, seems full of pitfalls as well as opportunities.  Honestly the show seemed to do above average in avoiding many of the former while exploring plenty of the latter.  Actually exploring Sherlock's addictive tendencies, not least in having a best friend who is a physician, makes for a good example.  Also the way laymen tried to "diagnose" Sherlock's personality (personally I'd call him a broad spectrum savant with autistic tendencies...).

More problematical lay in efforts to genuinely re-imagine classic Holmes stories, varying from the excellent ("A Study in Pink") to the somewhat discordant ("A Scandal in Bohemia").

A different problem popped up in the episodic televised medium, with ever-escalating dangers -- although, the series did generally focused its escalation on personal stakes for the characters rather than a spiraling upward of scale (a la Doctor Who in which the hero eventually saved the entire universe, followed by having to restore it after it had been destroyed, etc).

But what matters in comparison for my project is in making the Victorian story resonate for a modern audience.  In this respect the showrunners have it easy--we remain eager to see a brilliant detective solve crimes and protect us from crime.  Dracula on the other hand originally worked (in part) due to dangers the English public felt, that of foreigners and "unnatural" sexuality as well as diseases.  Short of making the vampire a Muslim serial killer with super AIDS how does one translate that horror into our modern era?

My own thought in that direction is to focus on a different set of tensions, ones already in the book but more keenly felt today.

Such as our increased myopia about death, our even greater trust (and distrust) of science (or technology), the sense of siege in the face of cultures we don't understand (including subcultures of our own society), the misunderstanding at the heart of religion vs spirituality, and the tensions surrounding women.

To be continued