Carmilla

Carmilla
By Adam Yee, after the novella by Sheridan Le Fanu. A Kle Zeyn Theatre Production. La Mama Courthouse, Carlton VIC. 2 – 13 May 2018

Were this play not so precisely staged, if its music were not so integrated and evocative, and the two lead women – Georgia Brooks and Teresa Duddy – not so well cast and so disciplined, then Carmilla could fail.  It could even risk seeming rather silly.  But staging, music, casting and performance are so well judged and well felt here that this adaptation of a 19th century Gothic novella works very well indeed. 

Director Karen Wakeham puts her musicians on stage – conductor Tom Pugh, Elizabeth Barcan (flute), Pri Victor (tenor saxophone), Lyndon Chester (violin), Rosanne Hunt (cello), Edit Golder (piano) and the playwright and composer himself, Adam Yee (organ and glockenspiel).  At the La Mama Courthouse that means they occupy a full third of the stage, but the staging for the actors is both striking and simple – at times almost suggesting tableaux (or a book illustration of the period), at other times using swift but stylised movement.  The music is integral: it continues throughout the piece and beyond, punctuating, bridging and enhancing emotion.  At first, it’s ‘spooky’, verging on something close to cheesy (like a ‘horror’ B-pic), but that keys us in to the ostensible genre and, as it proceeds, Mr Yee’s music becomes more complex, varied and powerful. 

As writer, Mr Yee wisely simplifies the source material - Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu’s serialised novella of 1871-72.  Young and lonely Laura (Georgia Brooks) lives with her father (Joshua Porter) in an isolated castle surrounded by forest, in Styria.  They are expecting a visit from father’s friend, General Spielsdorf (John Cheshire), and his daughter, Bertha (Danielle Carey), but they receive word that Bertha has died in frightening and mysterious circumstances… There is no explanation why or exactly how the beautiful Carmilla (Teresa Duddy) shows up at the castle soon after –  and the character of her mother, source of misleading exposition and warnings in the original, has been eliminated.  But curiously the lack of explanation increases the narrative drive and grip of the story.  Mr Yee, even more than Le Fanu, relies on types – the naive, vulnerable maiden, the inattentive father, the beautiful and mysterious visitor, the avenging parent.  There is such tension, risk – and sympathy - in Carmilla’s seduction of Laura, and in Laura’s deeply ambivalent succumbing to Carmilla - that our attention is held to the end.  Well, almost to the end, when the obligatory resolution must be enacted – but even there, the music lifts the emotions out of cliché.

Ms Brooks gives us a kind of passivity and then a confused arousal in her Laura that is just right, while Ms Duddy has a kind of exotic intensity that is erotic and frightening.  The women’s gowns - by Wendy Drowley and Gwendoline Paras - suit the characters exactly.  As the General, Mr Cheshire might gesture less and leaven his outrage with some military gravitas: what has happened to his character and what he does about it is surely unprecedented and shocking.  Mr Porter is perhaps too young for his role as Laura’s father, but he plays it with conviction and that is all that’s required.  As for, Ms Carey as the unfortunate Bertha, she is mainly required in this case to be sweetly lovely and she is.

Le Fanu operated within the strictures of 19th century ‘morality’ (or hypocritical pretence), but it is quite clear that sex and death are closely mingled here –as they are in Le Fanu’s successor, Bram Stoker.  The lesbian vampire Carmilla’s hyper-romantic yearning for Laura’s love – and blood – is, as it were, the beating emotional heart of the story, propped up with the mythology of mysterious creatures, ruined villages, long dead ancestors and ritual killing.  The simplicity of means, the stylised staging and performance here captures that essence and makes these 19th century tropes and emotions as disturbing as they have ever been.  A well deserved revival from La Mama’s Explorations season.

Michael Brindley     

Subscribe to our E-Newsletter, buy our latest print edition or find a Performing Arts book at Book Nook.