Show name: Dracula: Lucy’s Dream
Performers: Dominique Cattani, Yejin Choi, Sebastian Moya, Marina Simonova, Kyra Vandenenden
Venue: Lennox Theatre at Pleasance at EICC
Date and time: Monday 17th August, 5.30pm
Ticket price: £23.00
Rating: ★★★★★ 5/5
Reviewer: Sarah Turnbull
Dracula: Lucy’s Dream opens with an implicit dare: believe in the things you know to be untrue. In a full house thrumming with anticipation, that invitation becomes a spell. What follows is hauntingly beautiful, a gothic fairytale that is, at times, properly scary, and a masterclass in making the familiar feel utterly new.
This is a wordless production that trusts image, breath and gesture more than explanation, and it pays off. We drift with Lucy between waking and nightmare, victim and liberator, dreamer and dream. The show keeps asking: was it real? Again and again, it has you questioning reality. Mirror images of Lucy multiply, versions of her splinter and recombine, and we finish where we started, as if caught in the looping logic of a fever. That circular structure deepens the unease, making the evening feel like a seduction we cannot quite shake.
The puppetry is astonishing. The boundary between actor and puppet dissolves so completely that, more than once, I genuinely couldn’t tell which was which. There’s sleight of hand everywhere: a puppet becomes a person in a blink; a human collapses back into wood and fabric without you noticing the join. It’s thrilling, disorienting stage magic that serves the story’s shapeshifting heart. One spellbinding reveal, Dracula seeming to emerge from a dog as if conjured out of the everyday, elicited a collective intake of breath, while a flurry of bats turned light and shadow into living things.
Visually, the production is a study in light and shadow. The lighting carves the stage into pools of dread and wonder, using shadows not just to conceal the puppeteers, who are impressively, almost eerily, invisible, but to paint the psychology of the scene. The design’s minimalism is part of its power: with multiple versions of Lucy, a scrap of cloth blooms into blood and figures vanish into blackout mid-step. These images lodge under the skin.
The sound world is equally evocative. A haunting score, perhaps Norwegian-inflected, threads through the action, augmented by a sound design that knows when to retreat into near-silence. Those quiet stretches feel the most dangerous, as if the theatre itself is holding its breath. The music and light conspire to twist the mind just enough that every shift in focus feels like a revelation.
Yes, the piece is peculiar and intentionally destabilising. That’s the point. It isn’t here to recount plot points we already know; it wants to make us feel the vertigo of Lucy’s experience. On that ambition, it delivers in spades. Dark, sensual and visually breathtaking, Dracula: Lucy’s Dream blurs beauty and horror, human and puppet, life and death, and does so with an elegance that lingers long after the lights come up.
This is the rare adaptation that doesn’t just reinterpret a classic; it re-enchants it.
