I have been wary of vampire-based theatrical productions since seeing a certain Bouncy Castle Dracula at last year's Edinburgh Fringe. That production was every bit as innovative and entertaining as its title suggests and The Vampire does top it in one major respect: the lack of a bouncy castle. I appreciate that, as the director's notes stress, this is meant to be simple and enjoyable melodrama, far from taking itself seriously - indeed the author himself wrote a parody of it - but that does mean that the production is essentially a pantomime without the jokes. Perhaps I am too trapped in a (post-) modernist, anti-structuralist, absurdist, minimalist view of the theatre to appreciate the simplicity and enjoyment inherent in The Vampire, but I would be very much surprised if most of the audience weren't as well.

A better production might have helped: no one seemed particularly confident on stage, either with their actions or their lines, and, though there was nothing hideously wrong, the whole production struggled to get above the level of a decent school play. There was, apparently, an effort to remain "sensitive to the time period without constraining ourselves with absolute authenticity in our costumes, setting and original music." This could just about hold water until the toy swords were drawn for the fight scene.

All in all, the main problem was consistency. Had the melodramatic pitch reached by Richard (Jon Conolly) and Effie (Argyro Nicolaou), the young sweethearts, been maintained smoothly and seamlessly throughout the play then they might have just pulled it off, but there were too many awkward pauses and stumbles across the board for this to be achieved. Even those scenes were let down by clunky transitions into songs. These musical interludes, scattered throughout the play, were accomplished with varying degrees of success, another aspect that added to the patchy feel of the production. Certainly, as the programme notes admit, the drunken shanty preceding the final scene, in which the whole cast enter to act as backing dancers, was the most bizarre, but, they also assert, was in the original script.

Perhaps the stuttering elements in the production will be smoothed out over the course of the run. One can hope. But one cannot really escape the fact that melodrama, however self-conscious, is not commonly revived for a reason. This reviewer's faith in vampire-based theatre certainly remains unrestored. By Josh Pugh Ginn