Wilton’s Music Hall is the oldest surviving Victorian music hall in London. Set down a little alley in east London, Wilton’s is just a little door in the wall, but step inside and you are greeted with a step back into the capital’s history. Wilton’s Music Hall is a grade II listed building, now a more general-purpose performance space for original theatre.
Wilton’s was the choice venue for the Mark Bruce Company’s production of Dracula, touring the UK throughout October. First published in 1897, Dracula is a gothic Victorian tale of unsettling happenings surrounding the existence of Count Dracula, fitting for the music hall. For the Mark Bruce Company,Dracula was superbly danced by ex-Rambert dancer Jonathan Goddard, now part of the Goddard-Nixon pairing and the New Movement Collective.
Goddard ripped his way through the role, portraying the Count as a desperate and lonely sufferer, smothered constantly by three vampire brides. For Bruce his stories are usually ones of psychological intrigue, managing to get under the skin of his audiences and disturb their preconceptions. For his tour of Dracula, Bruce succeeded again through various uses of stereotypical vampire imagery, made literal by employing garlic, crosses and stakes through the heart to extinguish one, yet all led the audience to the bigger picture of both Victorian society and and the preconceptions of such gothic goings-on.
The company of dancers were a credit to Bruce, thoroughly convincing in emotional, and at times psychotic, performances, as humans, animals and vampires. As a dance production, Dracula was a success, with a group of scores that merged perfectly with Bruce’s apt movement vocabulary. Goddard was transformed into a mostly human Dracula, and back again to his immortal form, constantly running, and running on emptiness.