Laura McKeller, left, Michael Cornell, Laura Castle and Jamie McKeller in Neon Crypt Productions’ debut show, Dracula:The Bloody Truth
NEON Crypt Productions is the new theatre enterprise from Jamie and Laura McKeller, ghost-walk purveyors of the Deathly Dark Tour on York’s haunted streets.
They are no stranger to theatrical performance, not least for the Rowntree Players or presenting A Night Of Face-Melting Horror, and so setting up a stage company is not a giant leap for McKellerkind, but more a logical extension of their comedy horror-rooted entertainment empire that also incorporates Neon Crypt Films.
For Neon Crypt Productions, they are joined by like-minded stage cohorts Laura Castle and Michael Cornell, a core company that plans to mount two shows a year, next up November’s premiere of The Wetwang Hauntings to mark Halloween.
The quartet has made a canny choice for this week’s debut: the mishap-strewn comedy of physical theatre troupe Le Navet Bete’s prank and pratfall-filled account of Dracula fits as snugly as a false set of fangs for the Count.
Note the show title: Dracula: The Bloody Truth. Not Bram Stoker’s account of Dracula, but one that will “shatter the lies spoken by the charlatan Stoker and finally shed light on what actually happened”. In other words, Stoker’s Dracula sucks. Why, he is even called ‘traitorous” here!
This is Professor Van Helsing’s corrective, corrosive version of Dracula. “It’s a public information seminar, not a show,” insists Jamie McKeller’s exasperated, deeply dischuffed Dutch professor, who takes on the narrator’s role with a disdain for theatre and yet finds himself at the helm of a play within a play. One where Van Helsing and a troupe of multi-role-playing actors strive to enact Dracula in the face of an obstacle course of calamitous impediments on a misbehaving black-and-red set.
McKeller performs the balancing act of playing a humourless character yet eliciting humour aplenty with brio: the importance of being earnest writ large while mayhem abounds around him. Collapsing scenery, role swaps, misplaced props, mistimed sound cues, blows to the head, nothing will deflect him from his cause with so much at stake.
You will know this frantic comedic style from the riotous work of Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson’s Bottom, Lip Service, Mischief Theatre, Oddsocks and Shakespeare-on-a-bike exponents The HandleBards, as well as Le Navet Bete, of course.
Now add Neon Crypt to that list, as the two Lauras, McKeller’s Mina Harker and Castle’s Dracula and Dr John Seward (or C-word as Jamie McKeller’s Van Helsing pronounces it), are joined by Cornell’s increasingly feverish solicitor Jonathan Harker, blonde-wigged Lucy Westenra and wild, fly-munching Renfield.
Under Jamie McKeller’s direction, the energy, the pace, the daftness, never drops, as restless and relentless as Van Helsing, making everything Count in large amounts as they get stuck into Dracula with storytelling relish, theatrical flamboyance and dextrous comic timing.
As much a comedy troupe as a theatre company, welcome to the York stage scene Neon Crypt Productions. This start is bloody good fun!
Neon Crypt Productions in Dracula: The Bloody Truth, Theatre@41, Monkgate, York, today at 2.30pm and 7.30pm. Box office: tickets.41monkgate.co.uk.