Our Interview with a (Sort of) Vampire Tatty Hennessy
Our Interview With A (Sort Of) Vampire series introduces two of the brilliant creatives behind the NYT REP’s upcoming production of Dracula. Up next is writer Tatty Hennessy on how she sinks her teeth into creative adaptations, what a vampire is to her and how she’s brought Bram Stoker’s story from page to stage…
Interview and pictures by Beatrice Updegraff for Mobius Industries.
“I spent a week with the director and the actors just pulling apart Bram Stoker’s story and sort of thinking, okay, what is a vampire? What was a vampire then, what could a vampire be today? The thing I think we’re afraid of with the vampire isn’t that they kill you – it’s that they make you into one of them. They bite your neck, suck your blood and then you become a vampire. It’s not that you are a victim, it’s that you become a perpetrator. They have no reflection – that trauma and pain and fear will turn you into something you can’t recognise. That idea of someone becoming strong by making somebody else weak is a power dynamic you see throughout history. And that’s something we’ve really looked at in the story.”
“Reading the novel I realised this is about a group of young people whose lives are just beginning and having their opportunities cut and curtailed by this malevolent force from the past that doesn’t want to face modernity. It just felt so contemporary. And to be able to do that story with loads of buckets of blood – it’s amazing. I think we all have this memory of the novel of Dracula – gothic castles, Transylvania on a mountain. And actually that’s only about twenty pages of the novel. Most of the book is about the young people in Whitby dealing with this mysterious illness that one of
their friends has… and they have to fight against this thing that’s trying to take their future from them. That feels super relevant to today.
“I’ve always written things, written whatever I could, but thought that I would be writing prose. And then when I was 14, I was really lucky that a director from the Gate Theatre came to my school and did a free after-school playwriting workshop and kind of introduced us to the idea of playwriting… that was the medium that I write in – scripts and drama ever since.”
“What’s frightening on a page is very different to what’s frightening in a room. We have this whole theatrical bag of tricks – light and darkness and sound – to immerse an audience. And we’ve thought a lot about monsters, and that what’s frightening is often the things you can’t see, using the audience’s imagination to fill in the gaps with what they find frightening. I think you will jump and you’ll maybe scream and you’ll laugh, but also you’ll be able to sit in a room with other people facing the fears that I think we’re all facing alone a lot of the time at the moment… there’s something really cathartic about facing our fears as a community in a theatre. Plus there’s blood and gore and fights as well.”
