The Vampyr: A Soap Opera

This glorious tale of Ripley the Vampyr, a gorgeous, but deadly creature of the night, performed in a lavish Opera originally written by Heinrich Marschner. This BBC production is out of print, but you can find it on Amazon and Ebay.

Even if you don't think you'll like opera, director Nigel Finch gives us an a great story told through music. The story has some sexual scenes, and some violence. But Ripley the Vampire has a debt to pay, lest Satan recall him back to the Underworld.

The Vampire Ripley has a big problem: he has to kill "three lost souls in three short days!" Ripley's master, "The Lord Of Darkness" will call him back to underworld if he doesn't deliver those innocent souls. All that and coping with the modern world. Omar Ebrahim as Ripley is brilliant!

BBC TV musical film based in an opera which as inspired by the first modern vampire published story ever. The movie is adapted to modern days and all dialogues but narration are sung as in opera.

The original story has been written by John William Polidori but was miscredited, while published in 1819 and often ever since, to Lord Byron, who had written a fragment of a similar story but quit without finishing it. Both met Mary Wollstonecraft, her future husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and her stepsister Claire Clairmont in Switzerland in June 1816. In that occasion, Byron suggested that each one wrote a ghost story. That amusing contest would enter the history of world literature, as Mary Shelley developed a story that would originate her Frankenstein, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote some ghost stories that would also eventually be published besides reviewing Mary's draft, Byron wrote his aforementioned fragment with a character named Augustus Darvell, and Polidori would get that character and merge him with a parody of Byron himself in order to create Lord Ruthven, the core character in what would be the first published modern vampire story in English, The Vampyre.

That tale by Polidori would be adapted as a play named Der Vampir oder die Totenbraut by Heinrich Ludwig Ritter in 1821, and this would be the basis for the libretto Wilhelm August Wohlbrück would write for his brother-in-law Heinrich Marschner's opera Der Vampyr, firstly performed in 1828.

This TV film is a 1992 "modernized" adaptation of that opera. It is quite sluggish and boring. I wished it were a plain film version of the original story written by Polidori and born in the very night Frankenstein and the modern Prometheus have also been created.

Ripley is a 19th century vampire that is woken from suspended animation in London in the 1990s. He proceeds to do what vampires are best at, work in the stock market! The singing in this film is generally good. Omar Ebrahim is excellent as Ripley as are Phillip Salmon and Richard Van Allen. The production is very stylish and has many contemporary elements in what is essentially an old tale. It has a few truly sublime moments where modern life and an operatic form are brought together in a most convincing way. The little scene in the carwash is a good example if this. The words here are marvelous. A girl is seen coming to work and as she arrives the owner sings: "Morning susie, be a brick. Cup of tea would do the trick". Susie then reads the news from the morning paper. It's all very natural and fits in with the music very well.

'Der Vampyr: A Soap Opera' was a surprisingly fang-tastic treat, and is a great chance to get acquainted with a rarely performed opera and composer.

It's not for traditionalists. Marschner's 'Der Vampyr' has been thoroughly modernised and revamped, and with the nudity, sexual scenes, violence and crude language it's more explicit. However, despite how this all sounds, reading about it is enough to make you think this could be a disaster, this all adds to the atmosphere and the opera's allure, which is actually entertaining and adjusts well to being modernised. More importantly, the basic story is never lost.

The glitzy production values look glamorously colourful and darkly sinister, all captured beautifully by the clever and sometimes cinematic-looking photography and surprisingly excellent special effects (especially for opera). The staging is hugely entertaining and has a lot of spooky atmosphere at the same time, complete with some legitimately funny and smart moments in the dialogue.

Musically, it is spot-on, with full blooded and lavish orchestral playing, while also with a suitably light touch that goes wonderfully with Marschner's music, and superb conducting by David Parry. The performances are better than one can ask for, especially from an outstanding in every way Omar Ebrahim as a deliciously evil and seductive Ripley, Richard Van Allan who provides for a typically authoritative father figure and a strongly characterised Phillip Salmon.

Fiona O'Neill, Willemijn Van Gent, and Sally-Ann Shepherdson in the main female roles are no less fine either, while the sound quality is excellent.

All in all, modernised Marschner that works brilliantly. Well worth tracking down. 10/10 Bethany Cox