Nosferatu: A Play on the Vampire by Francisco Nieva

Nosferatu: A Play on the Vampire by Francisco Nieva ROBERT LIMA In all the darkest pages of the malign supematuralthere is no more terrible tradition than that of the Vampire [...J Montague Summers, The Vampire: His Kith and Kin Until 1961, when Francisco Nieva wrote his play Aque/arre y nache roja de Nosferatu ("Witches' Sabbat and Red Night of Nosferatu"), the theme of the vampire had not been treated in serious Spanish or Spanish American literature . With the play's belated publication in [99[ and production in 1993, the Spanish-speaking public was given an opportunity to experience, through the interpretation of one of its dramatists, a dark subject that had long fascinated many readers and filmgoers, Spaniards included. In order to achieve his end of infonning and interpreting, Nieva steeped himself in the lore of the vampire, derived from sources which, by necessity, were external to Spain. That material , extensive and multifaceted though it is, affected Nieva's conception of the vampire in an unexpected manner, for he found therein an opening to a new view; his is substantially a heterodox stance, a departure from the canonicity established by the first assessors of the tradition. The lore and literature of vampirism was early on assayed by the famed occultologist Montague Summers in The Vampire: His Kith and Kill,' wherein are discussed numerous novels, stories, poems, and plays on the dark subject. Summers devotes many pages to the notorious tale The Vampire ([819), reputed to have been written by Lord Byron but actually penned by his physician , Dr. John Polidori.' And the most nefarious, and popular, in its day, Summers notes, was Varney the Vampire, or, The Feast of Blood, a 686-page novel by either Thomas Preskett Prest or James Malcolm Rymer, first published in 1847. But, be it founded on Varney or on another early manifestation of the vampire genre, the lore of the Undead has generally been presented seriously in literature and other arts, and most notably in Bram Stoker's semiModern Drama, 44:2 (2001) 232 Nieva's Nosferatu 233 nal Dracula (1897), from which have come its truncated English stage adaptation of 1924 by Hamilton Deane and its American revision by John L. Balderston in 1927; the elegant and highly romanticized Broadway production of 1977; and the works of the contemporary novelist Anne Rice, beginning with the controversial and revisionist Interview with the Vampire (1976) and continuing through numerous sequels, among the latest of which is The Vampire Armand. But Nieva is not informed solely by the literary; he is openly indebted to filmography for many of the images of the vampire that his play conveys. In cinematographic culture, the motif was first given visual treatment by F.W. Mumau in his great silent film Nosferatu (1922) as a rather loose adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel; thereafter, the motif became a genre as it evolved through the Bela Lugosi era, beginning with Tad Browning's classic film of 1931,3 and, more recently, devolved into satiric pottrayals of the Undead in such films as Roman Polanski's multi-part The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) and William Crain's Blackula (1972). And what can be said of the extravagant and quirky film version of the Dracula story by Francis Ford Coppola (Bram Stoker's Dracula, 1992) or of the long-running TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer? The Dracula mystique even invaded the realm of the very young through the breakfast cereal Count Chocula and television's counting Count on Sesame Street. So heady was the modem reintroduction of Stoker'S character into all areas of popular culture that in 1977 Time magazine was prompted to ask, "Is Dracula Really Dead?" (60). The magazine's exclamatory statement is even more applicable today. The topos of Nosferatu, erroneously believed to be a Romanian term for the myth of the Undead,' has had its greatest literary expression in Stoker's novel. But the tradition of Dracula and his ilk has not fared well in recent years, faIling on hard times through revisionist, often defamatory practices. The latest assault on the serious tradition of vampirism comes from an unexpected quar~ ter - Spain. This assault is unexpected because...