Dracula, a Comedy of Terrors review

Teasing out the feverish sexual subtext embedded under the skin of Bram Stoker’s genre-defining horror yarn, writing partners Steve Rosen and Gordon Greenberg deliver a campy, surprisingly sweet-natured story about the conflict between selfish desire and selfless love.

First seen Off-Broadway in 2023, the play’s plot remains largely faithful to the original. But Rosen and director Greenberg flesh out the characters in unexpected ways, reframing Stoker’s infamous bloodsucker as a spoiled, dangerously entitled predator, while Lucy is not an anaemic damsel-in-distress, but a plucky, self-possessed heroine.

Greenberg gives the piece a pacy staging, cranking up the text’s inherent melodrama to impressively ridiculous heights, while keeping up a relentless string of breathless puns and flawless sight gags. One particular quick-change, in which an actor plunges from a window as one character and near-instantaneously re-emerges dressed as another, brings the house down with its impeccable timing.

The stylish set from Tijana Bjelajac presents suitably gothic interiors – dusty bookshelves, damask wallpaper and black-painted brickwork – broken up with hidden panels and concealed trapdoors to allow for dramatic surprises along the way. A pair of vitrines to either side of the stage house quirky scale models of the key locations: a jagged, sheer-walled Transylvanian castle and a neatly ordered English manor house. Ben Cracknell’s lighting adds dynamism and atmosphere to these spooky spaces, with eerie, dank-looking blue and green washes, deep zones of encroaching shadow, and sudden flickering strobes.

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