You are all invited...

THIS EVENT HAS SADLY BEEN POSTPONED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE

Imagine a radio station more or less today, in an America like our own.  And they are putting up an adaptation of a gothic classic.
Snacks will be provided.  Feedback eagerly sought.

Tempest Redux (review)

Spoilers ahoy!

Tempest Redux is a re-imagining of one of Shakespeare's last plays (many believe Prospero is a stand-in for the Bard himself). For the most part, this re-imagining consists of a careful edit, streamlining the show with considerable skill.  At least that takes up the most time in terms of changes.

But so much more awaits those who see this production.

Allow me to admit (as before) that as an audience member I'm very stingy when it comes to standing ovations.  Many the time, after a very good performance, my applause has been sincere and long, yet my seat remained occupied while others rose.  Just quality alone does not deserve a standing ovation.  My standard for such is when I feel genuinely changed by a performance, when my world is rocked in a way and on so many levels the world itself seems a different place.  Easily can I name really fantastic, wonderful, even trascendent works of theatre for which I did not rise.  Yeah, I'm tough that way.

Photo by Enci Box

For Tempest Redux, I could not help but rise to my feet.  In awe and gratitude, at the same time needing some time to recover from the power of this show.

I'll get to final revelation that felt like a slice into my soul in a little bit, but first -- the production overall.  Shakespeare's plays have the fantastic power of allowing all kinds of styles and methods to tell their tale.  This one, arising from the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble and the New American Theatre, startles in many ways.  One is its physicality, including having no less than three actors (Shea Donovan, Briana Price, Emily Yetter) simultaneously portray Ariel, lipsyncing recorded words in a kind of dance with sound and movement and even lights.  Likewise two actor together (Dash Pepin, William Long) were together Caliban, often entwined, sometimes hand-in-hand, or moving in complete unison.  The effect proved dazzling, even magical, and appropriate for the non-human characters.

Photo by Jeannine Wisnosky Stehlin

Kudos to the entire cast, actually, up to and including Mimi Davila as a feisty, kind, obedient and unafraid Miranda (just think about trying to convey all of those qualities at the same time).  Charles Hunter Paul likewise proved a refreshingly believable young prince, one capable of seeing in this strange girl all his heart might desire. Arguably these are the two most difficult roles in the play (much like Hero and Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing).  Dennis Gersten likewise did wonders as Antonio, faithless brother to Prospero, as well as the cook Trinculo.  Gildart Jackson shone in his double role as well--a grieving and sincere King Alonso, and as the delightfully supercillious Stephano, drunken butler to His Majesty (and would-be God King to the simple-minded Caliban).

But the star of any Tempest needs must be Prospero (Jack Stehlin), the aging father, exiled Duke, and powerful sorcerer.  Here lies the most startling and vivid performance of all, which frankly took some doing!  But then, this is the part to do it with.  We halfway expect to see Prospero as a version of Gandalf from Lord of the Rings or maybe Dumbledore from Harry Potter.  No.  Here we meet a dying old man, one distracted by his musings and full of sorrows, but also capable of the most tender emotions imaginable.  Indeed, at times he seems overwhelmed by his own heart, while increasingly surprised by events.

Photo by Enci Box

And here we get to the gut-wrenching spoiler.  Outline the next paragraph is you want to learn it.  You might prefer to wait and see the show.

Nothing we see is real, or very nearly nothing.  Prospero's loneliness and tragedy have driven him mad, until at last waking dreams of a sublimely happy ending take form.  I myself suspect Ariel is real, and has faithfully created these illusions for her Master all these years, and as he sets her free at last, harsh reality closes in.  Prospero is wise, and good.  We long for that happy ending this man deserves so very very much -- and in the end he has nothing but his wandering wits, and a tiny skeleton of the daughter who of course did not survive.  "Now all our revels are ended..."

I had the great good fortune to speak with the director/adaptor of this play, John Famanesh-Bocca, and can only say I will eagerly attend any show of his in the future.  Just as I felt honored to meet the cast and tell them individually this was indeed the best version of The Tempest I have ever seen.

Tempest Redux plays at the Odyssey Theatre at 2055 South Sepulveda Boulevard Los Angeles, CA. 90025 until April 10, 2016 Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 2pm. NOTE: THIS SHOW HAD BEEN EXTENDED. 

The Oresteia (review)

Spoilers ahoy!

Way back when I was getting my degree in Theatre Arts at the University of West Florida, the first reading assignment in Theatre History class was The Oresteia. This marks the only complete trilogy to have survived from Ancient Greek Theatre (which traditionally told stories of their myths and legends in that format). It tells of one royal family's bloody aftermath in the wake of the Trojan War--most specifically, the fate (remember that work, it comes up a lot) of King Agamemnon and his son Orestes.

It makes for a tricky work, because Ancient Greece held a very different world view than our own--different yet in some ways familiar. For example, they were pantheists with a multitude of gods, a fact I've seen audiences find very hard to grasp. More, the Greek Gods were only partially individuals in the way we humans see ourselves. They were also forces of nature, and to violate those forces was to risk much--not because the gods were cruel or petty (although they could be) but because they literally embodied things like law, the oceans, physical love, the conscious mind, etc. Thus they tended to see what we would call "sin" in very legalistic terms, but also with said laws being part of nature itself.

Credit: ZJU

What director/adaptor Cyle Conley has done here was boil the entire trilogy into an hour--and let us note up front, successfully. A tale of royal revenge, it echoes what many regard as the greatest achievement in English theatre that way, namely Shakespeare's Hamlet. Instead of focusing upon the question of whether revenge even makes any sense, The Oresteia (or "The Orestes Plays") presumes the central character deserves his revenge. Orestes' mother murdered his father the King. She did so out of revenge for his sacrificing her daughter Iphegenia to the gods in order that the Greek ships might sail to war. When he arrives back from the war, victorious, she seemingly welcomed him with open arms. In fact, she has never ever forgiven him for slaughtering their child.

Interestingly, neither of King Agamemnon's other children--Orestes and his sister Electra--mention their murdered sister. Not even once. But then, the Greeks didn't quite regard women as full human beings. Like I said, they seem terribly familiar in some way. Agamemnon brings home the Trojan Princess Cassandra as a slave and concubine.  Cassandra refused the advances of the god Apollo, after he had given her the gift of prophecy. In revenge for her refusal, he cursed her to none would believe her visions of the future. In an added cruel touch, she herself knows her words will go unheeded.  Warning Agamemnon or trying to save herself will not work. Cannot work. Such is fate.

Credit: ZJU

From this brew of character and passions, a hideous irony emerges. Orestes has been wronged, his father murdered. Apollo himself (remember his treatment of Cassandra) encourages the young Prince to kill the perpetrator. But to kill one's own mother is a special kind of crime, one that summons the ancient and terrible Furies--creatures from before the Gods, who seek out their own cosmic revenge against parent murderers and traitors among others. Not all crimes, of course. Only those deemed the worst of the worst--and spilling one's own blood qualifies in their inhuman eyes, a crime for which death is far too easy a punishment...

What startles is how well this entire epic fit into a mere hour! More, the plot and characters ended up presented with rather effective modernity. A chorus is reduced to one narrator (Rosalie Alspah) who quite self-consiously steps into the shoes of a goddess for the play's climax. William Walker plays the title character, neatly avoiding the trap of emoting all those passion-driven lines and instead spoke to people as a man who simply feels that much. Jessie Brown (who, like most of the cast, played multiple roles) in particular shone, not least because all three of her characters could have been slight variations on the same theme, yet ended up each a very individual expression of unhappiness and rage. In fact the entire cast did what must be called a good job, including Sarah Metcalf as both Queen Clytemnestra as well as one of the Furies, Jordan Klomp as her lover as well as yet another Fury (he was much better in the latter) and Michael J. Marchak as both King Agamemnon as well as the powerful, relentless god Apollo.

One more performance awaits of this Oresteia, at ZJU 4850 Lankershim Blvd (just south of the NoHo sign and north of Camarillo), North Hollywood CA 91601. Tickets are $15.

Carmilla: A Case Study in Adaptation

I recently did a general review of the 1975 play Carmilla by David Campton for vampires.com magazine. You can read it here. However, I have myself written my own adaptation of precisely the same novella which you can read about right here.

Okay, no big surprise. I liked mine more. But given how many versions of J.Sheridan LeFanu's work I"ve seen--many with great praise--that does not explain my reaction. As a writer, a playwright, a theater critic and as a great fan of this novella herein is my reaction.

Yeah, spoilers if you haven't read or seen any of this.

Essentially Carmilla is a very atmospheric gothic tale of what seems to be a love story between two young women, one of whom turns out to have been a vampire. So far so good.

Apart from anything else, here are my complaints about this play adaptation:

Writing-By-The-Numbers.  Honestly, it really does feel as if the writer were phoning the whole thing in, maybe trusting to some really skilled actor to weave silk out of a sow's not-very-well-groomed ear. Consider for example the exposition--all the many ways we writers have to make exposition interesting. And Crampton decided on one character repeating something to someone else something they both already know.

But more tellingly, the characters aren't real.  They become tokens the writer moves around for purposes of plot. Instead of individuals, they are mere "types.' Nor are they even interesting types! A vaguely sinister servant of dark powers named Ivan (who really might as well have been named Igor).  The fussy Englishman who used to be in the army and has to be nagged into stepping outside his comfort zone.  The ingenue who likes dancing and gossip and other than that just does what she's told.  And so on. As an archetype from which to build, any of these might be fine. None show any building however.

Stephen R. Donaldson--an author I greatly respect--wrote once in an essay about the difference between drama and melodrama, an idea that sank deep roots into my imagination. He noted the classic story of all melodrama involves three roles--the oppressor, the victim and the rescuer. The evil landlord ties the schoolmarm to the railroad tracks unless the Mounty can reach her in time. The wolf will devour this little girl in a red cloak, but the woodsman interrupts his villainy.  And so on.  Drama uses the same three roles, but has characters switch roles. Victim becomes oppressor.  Rescuer becomes victim.  Oppressor becomes rescuer. Often the best stories involve multiple characters who each play all three roles sooner or later, with and for each other.

The play never wavers from melodrama, however.  Which brings us to second issue.

Disrespecting the Source. As it happens I am extremely familiar with Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, having written not only a play adaptation but The Annotated Carmilla full of over 400 footnotes.  I well realize that literary (i.e. written to be read) and dramatic (i.e. written to be performed) media require changes when moving stories back and forth.  Not any change, however.  Not change for the sake of change. Certainly not change away from the heart of the story!

Carmilla can well survive all kinds of changes in terms of detail. As written it takes place in summer, but might well be told during winter. Set in Austria, yet two of my favorite adaptations change the locale to Hungary and to the United States--also shifting it in time to the 1980s or the present day.

However, this is what I mean by the heart of the story--in a deft emotional slight of hand, LeFanu wrote a tale that remains a drama. Carmilla herself is both victim and rescuer to Carmilla for example, each from their deep loneliness and each to the terrible undead hunger of a vampire. Laura's father is to some sense an oppressor who keeps his child isolated from the world and under his thumb, a rescuer and victim of Carmilla, then in turn becomes Carmilla's oppressor in his helping to destroy her. Add to all this the fact Laura herself is an unreliable narrator, that she contradicts herself and sometimes misdirects--in some sense the reader is her victim, but in doing so rescues them from truths too disturbing for comfort.

Likewise Carmilla isn't truly a pure monster. LeFanu did not villainize his vampire, rather making her someone as isolated and sad as Laura herself. She tries to resist feeding upon this girl, for example. More, the point is made explicitly that upon her destruction she will go to somewhere horrible, somewhere worse than the grave. Laura can never quite stop thinking of Carmilla as her friend. Neither, therefore, can we.

All this vanishes in Campton's play. Instead, the formulaic handsome young hero fights to save the ingenue from a selfish undead evil. Period. That character, not surprisingly, does not exist in the original. Not at all. In fact Captain Field's presence in the play leads to my third major problem.

Misogyny. Honestly this one stands out like a pillar of flame! The novella's central character without question remains Laura.  She is narrator and protagonist, her emotional life forming the backbone of the entire story. In this play she becomes a completely passive, even secondary character. She exists to be a target, nothing more. All agency and decisions fall away from her, to be given to Captain Field.

Nor is this the only example. The Ivan character mentioned before explicitly takes the place of the Countess, a charming stranger who calls herself Carmilla's mother. But even the secondary villain must be given male genetalia.  The one other female character surviving from the original text (which contains five, reduced to three) becomes likewise useless. In the original at least Madame Perradon helped set the stage for the strange wonders to come. But Campton's play takes even that individuality from her, turning her into nothing but a victim who overhears what she must not.

See the pattern?  Women as victims, or if evil, oppressors.  Men as rescuers.  Not only melodrama, but wedded to sexism as well.  Meanwhile, as the few female characters are cut out or weakened, a new male character takes center stage and an extremely minor character (the Doctor) is elevated to supporting--for no good reason I could figure out. Frankly, I"m still puzzled as to why he's in the script!

Along the same lines (and this may be a minor point) in the original we meet a fairly wide range of society's levels--military, servants, nobility, peasants, etc. This play levels all that and every single character seems firmly in the middle class, save for the villain. Even the Peddler turns out to be Captain Field in disguise! Okay, that is subtle but it marks another shred of quality stripped away for no good reason I can see.

The combination of all three added up to huge disappointment. It really does count in my mind as a textbook case of how not to adapt a story (along with the first Moby Dick movie with John Barrymore--in which Ahab gets the girl!)

New Dracula!!!

This is exciting to me. I should explain--one of my projects this year is getting a new web series off the ground. One hero for me in this effort is the staff of The Guild, but another is a gentleman who goes by the name Theodore Trout. He is the star and evidently guiding force behind an amazing, original production of Bram Stoker's novel. Dracula, Lord of the Damned looks like it was done on a budget that would pay for maybe a nice car, but with a startling imagination behind it (as well as lots of elbow grease).

In essence, the conceit of this production is that Dracula truly is the Lord of the Damned--the literal anti-christ who feels himself a great benefactor. After all, does he not bring truth and eternal life?

Well, he believes he does.

This version fairly drips with atmosphere, a dream like quality in virtually every frame. The costumes and sets cannot help but be rudimentary (see comment about the budget above) but one hardly realizes this. For one thing the camera work almost defines simple but effective. When Harker first approaches Castle Dracula, for example, it is by boat and the interplay of Harker's POV approaching landfall (with a suitably erie, ancient staircase) as well as a shot from land showing the boat bringing him is so simple--yet works extremely well.

Kudos also to the retention of virtually every major character. Usually, Lucy's three suitors are reduced to one or two, often none. This, like Bram Stoker's Dracula and the BBC adaptation with Louis Jourdain, includes the whole trinity. As far as I know this is also the sole version that ever has had Renfield the object of Victorian-era brain surgery (as he is in the original novel).

Is it perfect? No. The biggest weakness is the cast. When compared to some of the fine performers who have taken on these roles in the past--Kate Nelligan, Gary Oldman, Christopher Plummer, etc.--the repertory company here suffers. It isn't that they do a poor or even mediocre job. Not at all! In fact, they manage to capture the style of the film with their performances very well. But honestly, this Van Helsing is no Anthony Hopkins nor this Dracula a Denholm Elliott. Yet, they are good if overwhelmed by the style of the production.

Below you will find a trailer. You can get a lot more information (including other teasing clips and a way of ordering a copy) at Mr. Trout's YouTube Channel.

Polish TV Carmilla (Review)

Spoilers ahoy!

Here is the latest in my reviews of all known adaptations of LeFanu's vampire novella Carmilla. Again, for the sake of those who haven't read earlier posts, I'm restricting myself to recognizable versions of the original story. Thus a movie with a lesbian vampire in it named "Carmilla" doesn't count unless it is in some sense trying to tell LeFanu's tale.

In 1982 an adaptation aired on Polish T.V. How I got ahold of a copy is fairly convoluted, involving an estate sale and a third party. Frankly, I'd never even heard of this one and was excited to set eyes on such a thing. Unfortunately, it is entirely in Polish, a language I do not speak and there are no subtitles. Yet I know the story well and this was a remarkably faithful version. Following it proved not difficult.

The title character is played by Izabela Trojanowska, who certainly brings to it an air of otherworldliness and predatory charm. She's evidently mostly known as a pop singer in Poland. I've learned little more about the production, sad to say.

What I can say, having watched it, is this might be the single most faithful version yet made. It begins with the prologue missing from every other filmed Carmilla. Then we view Laura's household as it is when the events of the story proper begin. For once she does indeed have two governesses, the older and no-nonsense Madame Perradon along with the more elegant and imaginative Mademoiselle de la Fontaine. We actually see the dynamic between them and Laura as well as Laura's father. We get a sense, for example, of the class differences between them. More (in fact, vital) a sense of Laura's place here is only too clear. Lonely, saddled with (relatively mild) rules and subtle expectations in lieu of distractions or pleasures. She comes across as a waif, but not really an ingenue. More like a girl on the verge of womanhood with little or no idea what that means, obedient by habit almost to the point of invisibility.

One thing that impressed me about this was how much the story remained from her POV. More than once the fact people were keeping things from her became vivid through the camera work. That their mysterious guest focuses nearly all her attention on Laura of course proves intoxicating. Carmilla's arrival matches that of the book, but handled with what clearly couldn't have been a large budget. No carriage accident on screen, but as staged there was no need. A nice touch were the servants accompanying Carmilla's "mother." Not only silent, each had a kerchief tying their jaws shut, precisely as undertakers treated the dead in the 19th century. Shades of Marley in A Christmas Carol.

Also included was the Mountebank selling charms against the vampire, although he is freaked by Carmilla's presence and later is brought back to do a drunken scene in the local graveyard which substitutes for the whole Baron Vordenburg sequence. For the sake of plot, Laura's father seems to be merged with General Spielsdorf, allowing him to have the scene of "catching" the vampiress about to feed. Good stuff! The peasantry, coming to ask help of the Polish equivalent of country squire worked well, allowing a flashback to the legend of a vampire hunter in the past. Like I said, the elements of the novella remained largely intact.

Mostly, though, what pleased me was the atmosphere--like an odd ghost story--and the relationship between the two female leads. Although predatory, this Carmilla seemed to feel a little guilt as her friend weakened. Laura herself seemed so modest as to willingly hold on to whatever little pleasures she could find, hardly thinking to ask for more. As her only friend is hunted down and destroyed, she seems in shock. Certainly no one seems to think her deserving of much comfort. Protection, yes. Care, certainly. But that she might have had feelings for this woman never seems to enter into anyone's mind.

I'll confess frankly to a wish the relationship between the two had been more sensual, that Carmilla be a bit more tormented a la Ingrid Pitt in The Vampire Lovers. But that is personal taste.

Yet all this leads up to a startling little denoument. In the aftermath of the vampire's destruction, Laura's father and Mademoiselle de la Fontaine fall asleep late at night in the main room. Each is in a comfortable chair as the candles flicker and the fireplace glows. The door to Laura's bed room opens. The girl emerges, wearing only her long white nightgown and for the very first time her hair is completely undone, like a pale mane of some animal. She glides into the room, waking no one. Her eyes fix upon the exposed throat of her governess...

Overall I was very impressed by this version. Very impressed indeed. Now if I can only find some English subtitles!

Adapting Carmilla

(Note: This is a version of an essay I've written and published online before. However, there are several differences.)

I like vampire stories. I also like adaptations, seeing how a story translates from one medium to another. But what I find intriguing as well as frustrating is the relative lack of adaptations of Carmilla. For those who don't know, this is a novella written by Joseph Sheridan LeFanu and generally agreed to be a classic of the vampire genre (if you're of a mind, the full text is right here). To my knowledge it has been filmed seriously three times--by Hammer Studios as The Vampire Lovers, by Roger Vadim as Blood and Roses and for Nightmare Classics using the original title. There was also Crypt of the Vampire which was reasonably faithful, at least in terms of general plot and had the added bonus of starring Christopher Lee. Three radio plays (one in German). Three known stage productions (one a chamber opera, another an erotic German musical). A pretty good version for Polish television. Another for French t.v. Still another (almost certainly lost) for the BBC in the 1960s (starring Jane Merrow).

And that is pretty much, as they say, it.

Now compare that to the dozens of plays, films, operas, musicals and ballets based upon Bram Stoker's novel! Just a role call of actors who' ve played the lead in straight adaptations make for an impressive list: Shreck, Lugosi, Villar, Lee, Palance, Oldman, Jourdain, Elliot, Langella, Warren, etc.

Why?

Methinks maybe I've figured it out.

Dracula has all kinds of mini-dramas going on, not least because the characters have full and interesting relationships. Lucy has three men proposing marriage to her, which everyone wants to keep the fatal illness of her mother secret. Mina's fiancee vanishes then reappears following a journey abroad. There's a madman, a shipwreck, an attempted murder, a detective story, a chase across Europe, etc.

Carmilla (written, it should noted, by someone who had not worked in the theatre) is a first person narrative. Its purported author is a lonely girl pretty in an isolated country estate. Other than the title character, she has no one her own age with whom to talk. We learn little or nothing about the lives and interests of those around her--her father, her governess, the housekeeper of the schloss (those two are nearly always combined into one character). The few other characters who do interact and at least have interesting stories to relate--General Spielsdorf, the mountebank, Baron Vordenburg--are little more than walk-ons. The other vampire victims are all off-stage. For that matter, there's only one vampire (Stoker's novel has five).

Another problem is the nature of the vampirism itself, at least in this story. Laura (the narrator) recounts her dreams but they don't really suggest very much in terms of dramatic stage actions. She doesn't go sleepwalking, for instance. She doesn't seem to become in any way vampiric. More importantly, no one seems to suspect the truth for the longest time--until the General and Baron show up and events spiral to their conclusion with breakneck speed but little enough suspense.

LeFanu's creation has never been called an adventure, after all. Its strength lies in the atmosphere, the mood and the subtle eroticism of events from the POV of someone who seems rather innocent, almost simple. Laura, quite simply, has not a trace of the spunk of Mina Murray or Lucy Westenra.

All of which creates problems for the writer trying to adapt same. Not necessarily insurmountable problems, though. Nor should we forget just how many elements from Carmilla have found themselves into various depictions of Count Dracula and other undead. Most tellingly, this vampire gets to know and woo her victim -- ubiquitous now in the genre yet totally missing in Stoker's novel.

Most versions "solve" the issues by moving away from the source. Laura (whose name usually gets changed for some reason) nearly always gains a male admirer of an appropriate age. The business of discovering precisely what ails the heroine (or narrator) is strung out, with aforementioned male admirer taking part in some way. Some kind of tension ends up introduced between father and daughter -- or Laura's father is transformed into her cousin, sometimes to serve as a love interest. Along the way one of the two governesses nearly always vanish. Others become victims of the vampire, characters we get to know.

It occurs to me a more interesting direction is deeper into the text itself. For one thing, it is in the first person which makes it the testimony of a particular individual. So might Laura be a less reliable narrator than we suspect? What, in other words, did she leave out from the written word? Perhaps out of (justified?) fear that others would read her words? Indeed, she seems to be recounting the story to an older woman from a city. But who is this woman? And how did this account end up in the papers of an occult scholar (as noted at the very start of the novella)?

As written, Laura also seems isolated from the others in her home. One might ask "Why?" What were her father, governess and housekeeper keeping from her? For what reason? And what did they think would happen if she found out? Laura evidently was visited by the spirit of her dead mother--were there other signs of her being psychic? Hints abound in the novella that Laura's mother was in fact a distant relation of Carmilla herself. Does this have something to do with why she died? For that matter, what is an English gentleman doing living in a remote estate in rural Austria anyway? Her father also agreed to take a total stranger into his home with little or no argument, upon the word of a strange woman he claimed to have never met before. What was up with that?

Nearly every adaptation either turns Laura into a pretty nonentity or changes her personality to reflect a stronger character. One wonders is this is really necessary. True, making a waif into someone interesting remains a challenge, but again -- Laura is the narrator. She does not dwell upon herself in any great detail. Methinks maybe we should recall that the novella was written long before the ready availability of dramatic media -- plays were rare, and movies unknown. The written word in practice must have received far more attention (which certainly helps explain those compound, complex sentences). Hence tiny details within the text abound to give an image of Laura's actual personality:

She has grown up speaking a polygot of English, German and French which she openly believes most could not follow. What a fascinating detail! Both isolating and yet ennobling. She is apparently quite as obsessed with Carmilla as the vampire is with her. Imagine two girls spending hours brushing each other's hair, for instance. And Laura gives no details, but admits to trying many a trick and tactic to get Carmilla to reveal her past. Both images have the potential for wonderful dialog or so it seems to me.

Curiously, the family dynamic of Laura's home rarely gets explored. Her father is quite elderly, so she was a child "late in life." English, he served in the Austrian Imperial Service and retired with a pension. Evidently this was when he married and fathered Laura. With an interest in medicine and a disdain for ghost stories (Laura was forbidden to hear any as a child), he seems rather conservative, gallant, and rather selfish in a subtle kind of way. Madame Perradon, described as a heavyset woman functioning as a housekeeper as well as mother-figure, is cheerful and down-to-earth. Lastly is Madame de la Fontaine, Laura's finishing governess of mixed German/French parentage and a tendency towards fancy as well as gossip.

As I've stated elsewhere, methinks the necessary tone is important as well. Dreamy, atmospheric films are a less obvious choice than some. But look at the magnificent Picnic at Hanging Rock with its fictionalized tale of a mystery and scandal at a Victorian Girl's school. Music and cinematography united to create precisely the kind of rhythm evoked by LeFanu's novella. Re-read the description of Laura's home again -- the rows of lime trees in the garden, the moat with its swans, the moonlight reflecting off the windows of the schloss, making it nearly as bright as day. Or the brilliant haunted house film The Haunting which does so much by suggesting rather than showing or telling (in this respect LeFanu's story echoes Henry James' The Turn of the Screw) . Since, like most people, I do see Carmilla as a love story of sorts I'd recommend the intensely erotic and beautifully filmed The Lover as a pretty useful template as well, along with the lingering photography of The Duelists (director Ridley Scott seems to have deliberately copied the colors and lighting of paintings).

Screenwriters, unless in collaboration with a director or directors themselves, almost never have the standing with which to make such a specific adaptation. Playwrights, on the other hand, lack the full set of tools screenwriters enjoy (musical scores, the close-up, etc.) while retaining far more control as well as greater opportunity to see their works done -- multiple times, perhaps, with different casts and designs. Yet for myself, I'd like to see both an excellent film and an equally wonderful stage version.

Does that make me greedy?

What I'm Writing...

I'm writing a vampire novel. Just started Chapter Six in fact and am pretty pleased at the progress. Check out the cool concept art at left!

Right now I'm at the stage where I'll let folks know what it is I'm working on, mostly in a blatant effort to generate buzz and therefore eventual sales. But there's also a reason psychological. I'm deliberately applying pressure to myself. Ah what a tangled web we weave when in writing we would achieve...!

Simply, in the 1840s a "penny deadful" novel titled Varney The Vampyre saw the light of day. At over two hundred chapters (that's right -- CHAPTERS) this best-seller proved a pivotal work in vampire fiction. With it began the whole trope of the Reluctant Vampire, as well as stuff like a portrait providing a clue to the vampyre's human identity and a team of intrepid would-be Slayers visiting a crypt as part of their anti-vampiric operations. Plus lots more. It really is a seminal work in the genre.

Unfortunately, it is very poorly written.

Look to the right. Among the links under Elsewhere On The Web is a blog devoted to Varney, in which an intrepid soul is going through the work offering her (very entertaining) commentary on each chapter. She'll show what I mean about the "poorly written" part. A few examples: Varney has something like seven different origins. Characters change names, subplots lead nowhere, major characters vanish for no apparent reason, the whole thing is chock full of compound complex sentences in the passive voice. And so on.

Having finally read Varney The Vampyre about the same time as someone mentioned the Darker Passions series and coinciding with the publication of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, an idea grew inside my mind. Such is often an omen. This was no exception. My notion seems relatively simple -- edit/adapt the original manuscript into something better, or at least something I'd rather it be. Arrogant? Well, yeah. Not an accusation I can truthfully deny, but on the other hand perhaps that is a necessary ingredient for my writing.

So--I titled my novel Baneworth. The family the Vampyre "haunts" for much of the first third enjoys the name "Bannerworth" but I wanted something more gothic. Rather than recreate the entire opus (which seriously loses the plotline after a time), my focus would be on said family. Along the way I nailed down a specific origin for the vampyre, along with cutting some superfluous characters (as well as truckloads of meandering incidents involving lost matches and the like). Likewise, the story takes place circa 1815, during the Regency. And because my sensibilities associate the undead with eroticism, the book is not simply a vampire story but also a kind of romance.

Regarding this last, allow me to state a preference or three. Frankly, what displeases me most in too many attempts at erotica remains the instant beginning of mechanical descriptions of coitus. How dull. What makes something sexy is not the act but the context, the story, the seduction and discovery. In other words -- foreplay. Hence my decision to write Baneworth with a gradually increasing air of sensuality. Part of that involved laying the groundwork for different potential couplings, yet allowing for uncertainty. Really, I'm not against formulas in fiction. Not at all. But at heart such should be a tool, not a set of laws. Without going into details, it seems to me that if you hint that A and B are getting together and they more-or-less do, then all the effort you put into C and D should lead up to some really startling surprise. For example, perhaps C and D are in fact rivals for the affections of E who in turn desires F. Expectation must be created if the writer is to thwart it effectively.

Writing Baneworth will probably take many more months, but my hopes are high. Wish me luck!