Edinburgh is a Gothic lover’s paradise, with its dark stone buildings, medieval church spires, torture museums, dungeons, ghost tours and witchcraft stores on every corner. Edinburgh Fringe is full of Gothic content – with shows exploring the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, the tragedies of Shakespeare and the very spooky Renfield.
The set of Renfield is an old, blackened bunker at The Banshee Labyrinth in the Old Town of Edinburgh, appropriately right next door to ancient underground vaults that have been inhabited by the poor, the mad, the criminal and the occult. (ArtsHub did a tour of them after viewing Renfield – they were genuinely terrifying.)
Corin Rhys Jones enters from the back of the audience, clad in a straitjacket and shouting madly, his eyes wide and deranged. He plays Dracula’s slave Renfield – the bug-eating maniac played with relish by Tom Waits in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 movie Dracula and, more recently, by Nicholas Hoult in the schlock comedy/horror film Renfield.
Rhys Jones has written and performed Renfield as a one-man show and his script is excellent. The character of Renfield is as creepy and compelling as it is in Bram Stoker’s novel, and his dramatic retelling of Renfield’s story could easily be lifted from the pages of Dracula. He has an excellent grasp of Stoker’s Victorian language and the tone of the play has the same compelling urgency and sense of drama as the original text.
As with the original, he toys with the motif of blood and incorporates the obsession with scientific experimentation, grave-robbing and dissection that gripped the English public in the late 19th century. He also brings a dark vampiric eroticism to the story when Renfield finds a prostitute in Paris who allows him to practise his blood-letting experiments on her for a price.
Rhys Jones pulls no punches with the content. There are dark undertones of necrophilia and gleeful descriptions of the taste and texture of spiders. This is certainly not a play for the faint of heart, but lovers of the Gothic will appreciate Rhys Jones’ take on the creepy Renfield and enjoy the depraved lengths he goes to in order to satisfy his craving for blood and follow the bidding of his master.
His performance is committed and strong. He works hard to bring clarity to a very wordy script with good diction and inhabits his character with relish and passion. Director Matt Panesh enhances Rhys Jones’ performance with a solid sense of pace and dramatic tension, although the sex scene with Margharite the prostitute has room for improvement. It appears awkward rather than erotic and is staged coyly to the side. A mime facing the audience would have been a stronger and braver directorial choice.
However, congratulations must go to Rhys Jones for executing an ambitious adaptation with an abundance of skill and creative flair; he was a worthy winner of the inaugural Best Performer Spookie Award at the Fringe. Renfield is a compelling script and gripping performance and the small audience who attended were vocal in their praise at the play’s end.
Read: Festival review: Tending, Edinburgh Festival Fringe
The only frustrating aspect is the sound coming in from the noisy punters in the adjoining bar. Hopefully the next iteration of this production will be at a venue that supports such an excellent production and performance rather than detracting from it.
Renfield’s season at Edinburgh Fringe is over, but it will perform on 16-17 September at Dundee Fringe and the Edinburgh Horror Festival on 31 October- 2 November 2024.
