Macnas return to Dublin for the Bram Stoker Festival and the scale of the performance is epic.
You'd think it was an ordinary day in Dublin: mellowing outside a Temple Bar café, elaborate coffee in hand. Then a pale fellow donning a crimson overcoat, with more than a smidgen of blood dripping from his mouth, thoughtfully says hello with a flash of his fangs.
An agent of Dracula perhaps? Or maybe Jo Mangan, theatre director of The Performance Corporation and artistic leader of the Bram Stoker Festival. Sending these vampiric figures (Anthony Kinahan and Camille Ross, sticking their charismatically deformed necks out) to scour the streets is one of Mangan's methods to engage the wider city, which is surely a challenge. The broad programme of events including a fancy-dress Shapeshifters Ball at IMMA, a VampWire zip-line in Wolfe Tone Square, and a range of readings and lectures seems intent to draw blood from that figurative stone.
