'Dracula' review — Cynthia Erivo takes a bite out of Bram Stoker's gothic novel

Read our review of Dracula, starring Cynthia Erivo, in performances at the Noël Coward Theatre through 30 May.

Summary

• Cynthia Erivo returns to the stage in Kip Williams's adaptation of Bram Stoker's gothic horror Dracula
• Erivo plays 23 characters in the one-woman play
• Performances continue at the Noël Coward Theatre through May

There is no denying that Kip Williams’s adaptation of Dracula opens with bite. Cynthia Erivo lies on the floor, gasping, as other versions of her writhe and jerk on a large screen hanging over the stage — an unsettling image closer to Kafka’s Metamorphosis than Bram Stoker’s 19th-century horror. She is surrounded by a sea of fluorescent stage markers, which signal the scale of the task lying ahead of her (and a large group of skilled camera operators) over the next two hours.

Dracula is the final instalment in Australian writer/director Kip Williams’s gothic cine-theatre trilogy, which began with Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and was followed by Sarah Snook’s magnetic Olivier and Tony Award-winning turn in The Picture of Dorian Gray in 2024, in which she played all 26 characters from Oscar Wilde’s chilling novel. Erivo is tackling a similar feat here, as the production (first seen in Sydney in 2024) uses a mixture of live and pre-recorded material to bring to life 23 characters from Stoker’s epistolary novel about a Transylvanian vampire and the small group that discovers his secret and hunts him down.

Erivo, who began her career on stage and has reached global acclaim thanks to playing another infamous outsider in movie musical Wicked, deserves praise for tackling such a relentless and challenging part, which requires her to constantly switch between personas, interact with pre-recorded versions of herself, and hit all her marks for the camera operators. She injects humour as the Gandalf-esque vampire hunter Van Helsing and the three squabbling suitors of Dracula’s victim Lucy (her Stetson-wearing Texan Quincey Morris is a highlight), and fluidly morphs between genders: one moment she’s the uptight psychiatrist Dr John Seward, the next she’s playing the gentle, feminine Mina, casting knowing glances at the audience. But in a production that demands so much of its performer, you can’t shake the feeling it’s about to run away from her. She wades through the dense script, which would have benefited from another round with the dramaturg, rushing out vast passages and occasionally stumbling over her words. Perhaps some of these issues will be ironed out over the course of the run, but for now there is too much jeopardy that she won’t get there.

Designer Marg Howell has swapped the sumptuous costumes of Dorian Gray for a deliberately muted style here; indeed, it appears that the blood really has been drained from this production, leaving everything in colourless tones and cast in Nick Schlieper’s sickly white light.

The camerawork is as slick as we have come to expect from Williams, with new, inventive angles such as a rat’s point of view, chasing a pair of ankles around the stage, and a bird’s eye view of Harker lying in a bed that resembles a casket at Castle Dracula. Most interestingly, the cameras create the impression that Dracula — in some form — lies within all of us. Williams has chosen to foreground desire and inner conflict to communicate societal anxieties within the novel, and has avoided focusing too much on other themes such as xenophobia, which is only lightly touched on by Erivo's accent for the Count.

Erivo’s characters mutate into one another, with suitor Arthur Holmwood’s head suddenly becoming Dracula’s, while obscure, overlapping images of different faces convey both attraction and repulsion to the depravity that Dracula represents. Conceptually it’s an inventive way of communicating this Victorian story, yet the screens also seem to inhibit any real sense of terror. Close-up shots of fangs and Erivo’s trademark talons scraping a cut neck aren’t enough to get the blood pumping, however well they’ve been framed. The balance seems to be off between the live work on stage, and the screens that dwarf Erivo.

By Dracula’s end, it is hard to keep up with Erivo’s many characters, and it’s a relief when she opens her mouth to sing the words “come with me”, like a siren’s call. It is a welcome reminder of the talented voice at the heart of this project, but is her West End return a show to die for? Not quite.

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Photo credit: Cynthia Erivo in Dracula. (Photos by Daniel Boud)