Reflecting on Dracula

On the things that find us in the dark.

A note before you read: this piece contains full spoilers for Kip Williams’ Dracula at the Noel Coward Theatre. If you are planning to see the production — and I strongly suggest you do — please come back and read this afterwards. It will still be here. And you may find it lands differently once you’ve been in the room yourself.

I was gifted a theatre experience for Christmas — a solo trip to London. I am a devoted Cynthia Erivo fan, and when I heard she was returning to the West End I was immediately keen to experience her craft work on stage for myself. I was, I’ll admit, a little blah about the material. I grew up a Buffy fan, dipped into Anne Rice in my twenties, but hadn’t properly engaged with Dracula in over twenty years. I was peripherally aware of director Kip Williams — the buzz around his production of Dorian Gray had filtered through, something about screens and cameras and a single performer — but I hadn’t dug into his methods or his intentions. The draw was Cynthia. If nothing else, I told myself, it would be a masterclass in stage craft.

I am glad I didn’t leave it there.

In the weeks before the trip I found myself diving into the world of Victorian Gothic literature — the novel itself, the context around it, the social and cultural moment it was written in and what was quietly burning underneath that moment. That is probably a whole other piece. But I am glad I took the time to arm myself not only with familiarity of the novel but with the world that produced it — what it meant to be respectable, what it cost (cough. Oscar Wilde. cough.), what got buried alive in the name of propriety. I came into that theatre with all of that sitting in the back of my mind.

I also came in willing to learn. Willing to sit at the feet of a master crafts person and let the work do what it wanted to do to me. I finally made it to the Noel Coward Theatre on Monday, 23 March. And what I experienced was a life changing piece of theatre.

I got to the theatre about half an hour early. Centre stalls, nobody in front of me — a small stroke of luck. Around me the house filled up — voices in different languages, bright shirts and tattoos, older couples, younger groups. All of us filing in with our own histories, our own reasons for being there.

Live theatre only ever exists in the moment. The performance the night before was different. The one happening tonight will be different again. Every person in that room brought their own history, their own heart — and for two hours we would share something that could never be replicated.

The lights didn’t go down to start the show. We sat there, anticipating, watching the odd crew member move through the space — and then, from the stage left wing, came a small focused woman. Black trousers. Black tank top. Black trainers. She walked to upstage centre and sat down with her back to us. The hush was quick to fall.

She rolled her shoulders. Stretched her neck. Took a breath. And lay down flat on the stage.

Then the lights went down.

Some performers walk out and you feel them grabbing the room. Cynthia Erivo did something different. She was entirely focused inward — and her focus was so complete, so absolute, that it drew an entire theatre of people in without a single word. She didn’t take the room. She simply became so present within herself that the room came to her.

A camera descended slowly from the ceiling until it hovered inches from her face. On the large screen above the stage, something extraordinary began to happen — multiple versions of Cynthia, seemingly emerging from her body. At first subtle superimpositions, heads turning different ways, arms moving differently. Then they began to break away. Crawling. Rolling. Standing. Walking out of her and off into the wings.

Every character she would spend the next two hours inhabiting, separating from a single body and moving into their own space.

All of them her. All of them already there, inside her, from the very first moment.

I didn’t fully understand that image until much later in the evening. But it was the thesis statement of the entire production, made flesh in the opening two minutes.

Before I try to describe what happens in this show, I need to explain something about how it works — and more importantly, why. Because the form is not separate from the content. The form is the content.

Kip Williams has spent the last several years building a gothic trilogy — Dorian Gray, Jekyll and Hyde, and Dracula — all using the same technology, all interrogating the Victorian interior and holding it up as a mirror to the present. Williams has spoken about his fascination with vampires as mythological manifestations of internal monsters — the story as a dance between fear and desire, characters working to defeat an external threat that perhaps reflects something they are actually afraid of within themselves. The parts of ourselves we have labelled dangerous. The other we have been taught to fear — and that we sometimes recognise, with a lurch of something complicated, as ourselves.

He has also described this production as a queer retelling. Explicitly.

Now. The technology.

Imagine watching a film being made in real time. Not filmed and then edited — filmed and projected simultaneously, live action and pre-recorded material interacting, overlapping, sometimes indistinguishable from each other. There were always camera operators on stage with Cynthia — sometimes three or four at once, plus a camera that descended from the ceiling on a rig. Their footage appeared on the large screen above in real time, which meant that regardless of where you were sitting, you could see in close-up exactly what was happening in her eyes. And her eyes were different for every character. Not just her voice. Not just her posture. Her eyes.

Some characters existed only in the pre-recorded screen world. Others Cynthia played live on stage. Some existed in both simultaneously — the live Cynthia appearing to stand beside or interact with her own pre-recorded self. In one sequence her Jonathan lay on a couch on the stage while on the screen above, the three vampire women surrounded him, leaning toward his throat. In another, cameras held at floor level followed her moving feet, giving the audience a rat’s-eye view while she navigated empty space on stage.

It sounds chaotic. And when it was chaotic — a storm, a pursuit, a mind fragmenting — it was so with absolute precision and purpose. The rest of the time it was one of the most coherent pieces of theatre I have ever seen.

The fourth wall was never intact in this production. The novel itself is written entirely in journals, letters, diaries, phonograph recordings — every character obsessively documenting what they observe, always writing to an intended reader, always aware of being witnessed. Williams carries that directly into the staging. We were never safe behind a fourth wall. We were always the reader the characters were writing to. There was always an audience to whatever was happening on that stage — sometimes the characters to each other, sometimes the camera, and always, underneath all of it, us.

Which means that when Dracula finally turns and addresses the house directly — he isn’t breaking the fourth wall. He is simply acknowledging what was always true.

We were always in the room.

I want to talk about Cynthia Erivo’s craft before I talk about the story. Because without it, nothing else works.

Reviewers have reached, almost unanimously, for the word athletic to describe her performance. It is a fair description as far as it goes. Once the show begins to move it is like watching someone run the hills of San Francisco — not uphill but down, at speed, with the precision of someone who knows that stopping is not an option. You simply have to keep moving or you will fall. There are moments of level ground. And then another hill. And another. Until you reach the bay.

She had, by some accounts, over twenty thousand words to deliver. She had to match the pace of pre-recorded scenes, hit precise physical marks for specific camera angles, and do all of this while moving between characters — full switches of voice, physicality, presence — sometimes within a single breath. Every character, even a small interjecting role, had a completely distinct vocal pattern. She swapped between them seamlessly, and the physicalisations were equally precise. A particular way of holding the shoulders. A quality of stillness or movement. Something in the hands.

Through most of the production the character transitions were assisted by a costume team — working on stage, in full view, with breathtaking speed. Wigs, jackets, glasses, props — changed in seconds while the story continued around them. As the show progressed and the characters began to bleed into each other, the costume changes became less frequent, and then stopped altogether. But I never lost track of who was speaking. Because by that point she had built each character so completely that the distinctions held even as the externals fell away.

There was one moment — perhaps halfway through — where she stumbled. Started a sentence, felt something was wrong, stopped. Took a breath. And began again. In the context of twenty thousand words, one reset. But what struck me was how she handled it. No apology in the body. No collapse of concentration. A breath. A return. A continuation. That is not a minor thing. That is years of training and prep.

I also want to say — because it matters and is too often unsaid — that a one-woman show is never a solo project. The camera operators who moved through the space with her, anticipating her every turn. The costume team working at impossible speed. The crew who transformed the stage in seconds, who stood at exactly the right place to hand her a prop, to open a box, to move a chair. They were outstanding. This production could not exist without them, and their craft deserves to be named alongside hers.

Now the story. Or rather — what this production does with the story.

The first section moves at pace. Jonathan Harker narrating his journals directly to the audience — the old townspeople urging him not to go, the strange coach journeys, the wolves, the meeting with Dracula, the first meal, the dawning realisation that he is a prisoner. The three vampire women. The boxes of earth. The escape. All of it in perhaps twenty or thirty minutes, Cynthia as Jonathan speaking at a clip, the story tumbling forward.

Dracula himself — voiced throughout in a rich Nigerian accent that I later understood was Erivo’s own choice — exists almost entirely on the screen during this section. A presence. A projection. Felt more than seen.

From the castle we move to Mina and Lucy. And here is where Williams begins to diverge from the novel in ways that are anything but arbitrary.

Lucy — so often staged as the lighter, airier of the two women, almost decorative in her function — is in this production sexual, witty, and entirely sure of herself. There is a scene not in the novel where she confesses to Mina that she and Arthur have already slept together. Mina is shocked. But in Cynthia’s performance there is something else moving underneath that shock — a fascination. A longing. A quality of attention that is not quite what it appears to be.

The attraction between the two women is not subtext. It is text — written in the space between words, in a glance, in the particular way Mina says Lucy’s name, in a blush, in a caught breath. I heard people debating it at the stage door afterwards. Another way people can sit in the same room and see the same thing and breathe the same air — but our experiences and our perceptions filter what we walk away with.

Dr Seward — Jack, as he is called throughout — is introduced next. His friendship with Arthur Holmwood carries the weight of something unnamed. His ill fated proposal to Lucy reads less like passion than like a man performing what society requires of him, not yet understanding why it doesn’t fit. He is quiet about it. Contained. Professional.

The remaining principal characters — Arthur Holmwood, Lucy’s fiancé; Quincy Morris, a Texan who was also a suitor of Lucy; the Dutch professor Van Helsing; and Renfield, the patient in the asylum Jack runs — exist only on the pre-recorded screen. They never step onto the stage. And this, I came to understand, is not a practical shortcut. It is an argument.

The screen is where you go when you have lost your autonomy — in either direction. Van Helsing, Arthur, Quincy represent order, society, the forces that pursue and name the monster. They are already decided. Already fixed. Pre-recorded and unchangeable — literally not alive in the same way as the characters who breathe and move and sweat in the room with us. But the screen also holds the vampire women, and Renfield, and Dracula himself — characters who have crossed a different kind of threshold. Who are no longer fighting what they are.

Both groups are beyond the reach of choice. The characters who were never free, and the characters who became, by society’s definition, too free. Fixed in different directions. Equally lost to the living world of the stage.

And between them — on the stage, present, physical, in the room — Mina and Jack. Feeling the pull. Still fighting the boundary. That is why they survive. Not because they are purer or stronger, but because they are still in the fight.

There is also a practical dimension worth naming. With so many characters existing only on screen, there are moments where conversations happen entirely between pre-recorded figures — giving Cynthia space to breathe, to prepare for what comes next. The genius of the staging is that these moments never feel like pauses. They feel like the story continuing in a different register.

The story, up to the point where they begin hunting Dracula, stays fairly faithful to the novel — greatly condensed, but structurally intact. Lucy’s sleepwalking. The storm. The strange dog emerging from the wrecked ship. Dr Seward’s observations of Renfield.

Renfield in this production is something particular. He does not eat his flies — he kisses them. The escalation of his hunger is present but rendered with a different quality. There is chaotic passion in him. An unrestrained release of things that in another man — a respectable man, a professional man — would be locked carefully away. Seward watches him with what he records as clinical detachment, and what reads in Cynthia’s performance as something considerably more complicated. Fascination. Recognition. A horror not entirely separable from longing. This undercurrent matters for what comes later.

Mina and Jack are increasingly the twin centres of gravity. Their hair nearly identical — long, dark, curly on her; shorter but the same texture and colour on him. Their clothes both tailored, both proper for the period. Williams quietly making them visually rhyme. Two people feeling the same pull, suppressing it with the same discipline, carrying the same thing carefully in the dark.

The search for Dracula’s boxes of earth introduces the production’s most significant departure from the novel. In Stoker, the boxes are scattered across London. Here, all but one are gathered at Carfax — and the group goes there together, leaving Mina behind to speak with Renfield.

As they work to sanctify the boxes, the rats come. Hundreds of them — climbing, biting, chaos. Jack narrates, and at one point on the screen behind him we see him covered in blood. Then Arthur grabs him, shakes him — and we understand from the Jack standing unmarked on the stage that what we saw on the screen was only ever in his mind.

But before that — unnoticed in the chaos, unmentioned to anyone — Jack discovers a bite mark on his neck. This is also the first time we see him put in the Dracula teeth. They will reappear at moments that matter throughout the rest of the production.

He carries the bite mark forward into everything that follows.

They are called back to the asylum. Renfield, beaten and raving, is desperate about Mina. And here the production gives us its most quietly devastating moment of staging — the only time Renfield steps onto the stage. It is Jack who plays him, putting on the straitjacket while his own wig remains in place.

The madman and the doctor. The one who surrenders to his hunger openly and the one who locks it away behind professional competence. The only difference between them is the straitjacket. And Jack puts it on himself.

They race to find Mina.

What they find, they were not prepared for.

Jack narrates the scene. He chooses his words carefully — he is a doctor, a man of his time — but what he communicates is that what they have walked in on is sensual, erotic. The music has shifted — a club beat, a very specific energy, an unmistakable nod, if you have the ears to hear it, to the spaces where people go to finally be exactly what they are.

On the screen, Mina and Dracula move together inside a large heart-shaped set piece — red, plush, intimate — that now sits centre stage. Dracula multiplies around her on the screen, his image shifting, at moments becoming Lucy. And Jack — in the teeth, his wig still in place — is drawn into the space with them. All of them present. All of them Cynthia. All of them, in this moment, the same.

In Stoker’s novel, Jonathan was present when Dracula came to Mina — but hypnotised, frozen, unable to move or intervene. Here, Mina is alone. No one was there. No one stopped it. That choice lands differently.

When Mina comes back to herself she is flooded with shame. Van Helsing presses a crucifix to her forehead — not in anger, not as punishment, but in the genuine belief that he is protecting her. There is no malice in the gesture.

It burns a mark into her skin that stays for the rest of the play. Transferring, as the production moves toward its end, between Mina and Jack and Dracula — until it belongs to all of them equally.

The others leave. Jack and Mina sit together in the heart shape. She speaks about feeling unclean. And Jack takes her hand and shows her the bite on his neck — the one nobody else knows about — and asks her not to tell.

This scene was played with such tenderness and such vulnerability that it struck me somewhere deep. I think many people have lived with a sense of shame or guilt over things they have felt or thought or done — some more than others. Alone in the dark with something that has no name yet, or that has a name they are not ready to say. The thorn in the flesh carried in silence, without an audience, sometimes without fully understanding what the wound actually is. Or the whispered conversation — like Mina and Jack’s — with one other person who also has a mark to bear.

This scene reached out and took the hands of those who recognised those emotions and said: you are not alone.

That is the power of theatre.

As they learn Dracula is heading home by sea, Van Helsing lays out what they know about the vampire — what it is, what it wants, how it must be destroyed. As he speaks on the screen, Cynthia stands on the stage in the teeth, moving with a vampire’s unhurried certainty. And on the screen around him, Williams overlays different iterations of the vampire across history. The classic 1930s Dracula. Nosferatu. A contemporary version — something between Blade and Interview with a Vampire. Each one distinct. Each one recognisable. All of them still Cynthia.

The monster is not new. It has always existed, wearing a different face in different eras. What it represents — the desire that cannot be permitted, the self that cannot be shown — has never gone away. Jack, on stage, in the teeth, is the fourth iteration.

Present tense.

The final movement of the production is deliberately, beautifully unmoored.

Snow begins to fall — on the stage and in the world of the screen, the same snow in both spaces, one landscape, one moment in time. It falls for perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes. The screen morphs into the shape of a giant cross and stays that way. Van Helsing occupies its centre for much of what follows.

The costumes continue to simplify. The wigs fall away. Mina and Jack and Dracula blur into each other and into Cynthia herself. Reviewers have noted losing track of the characters in this section — and I think that is exactly the point. By the time we reach the end there is only one person on that stage.

There is a moment where Dracula speaks into the minds of Mina and Jack — calling to them, telling them he has always been in them, that they will never fully destroy him. Cynthia delivers these lines directly to the audience. Looking into different areas of the house. Making eye contact.

In the logic of the play, a voice in two people’s heads. In the logic of the theatre — the production finally saying plainly what it has been saying in code for two hours.

You know what I am. You have always known.

The snow stops, I think, when they find him.

The chase. The coach. The box. The crew moves in front of it. Cynthia lies down inside. The crew steps away.

And she emerges.

A long, deep red glittering coat. No wig. No costume. Just herself, stepping out of the box with the unhurried grace of someone who has never once doubted their right to take up space. Dracula, finally, fully on the stage. Comfortable in his own skin in a way that nobody else in this production has been permitted to be.

He calls to Mina and Jack. Come with me. Give in. I have always been in you.

And then he sings.

Just three words. Come with me. Over and over, in a melody that never resolves, never lands where you expect it to — a discordant lullaby, haunting and slightly wrong in the way that desire can feel slightly wrong when you have been told long enough that it is. I have read reviewers who questioned this choice, who felt it was indulgent, a showcase for a voice that needs no showcasing. I understand the concern and I disagree with it entirely. In the moment I did not think about Cynthia Erivo’s voice. I did not think about her Grammy, her Tony, her career. I thought about Mina and Jack standing in the snow being called home by something ancient and patient and completely certain of itself. It was only afterwards, in the street, that I realised what I had been hearing.

That is what it means to serve the work.

The singing stops — suddenly, jarringly — as Van Helsing’s crossbow fires on the screen behind them. Dracula dies in the arms of the two people he claimed. His final words narrated not by any character but by Cynthia herself — the woman who contained all of them, stepping outside every one of them to close the story in her own voice.

In the eyes of Mina and Jack, as he disappears — a flash of the count.

He is not gone. He was never external. You cannot kill what lives inside you.

She turns her back to us.

The same position as the beginning — but now she is far downstage, close, rather than far upstage and private. The same black trousers. The same black tank top. The same trainers. Everything that was added over two hours stripped away. Just her body in the space and ours.

I believe — though I was too undone in those final moments to be entirely certain — that the cameras were gone. No screen. No mediation. No technology. The thing that all of it was always in service of, finally just present.

A human being. Live. Unrepeatable.

This is a production about what happens to people who are taught that what they want makes them monstrous. About the parts of ourselves we bury — then, and now, and in every era that Williams shows us the vampire wearing a different face. There is a little Dracula in all of us. The things we hide. The things we were taught to be afraid of in ourselves. The things that find us anyway, in the dark, and ask us — with great patience and no judgment whatsoever — to come.

A performer at the absolute height of her craft. A director with a singular and coherent vision. Camera operators, dressers, set crew, technicians — every one of them working at a level that deserves to be named and celebrated. Together they built something that transported a theatre full of strangers and then, when the lights came up, left us to wrestle with what to do with what they had given us.

Everyone in that theatre saw the same thing.

Everyone left carrying something different.

Dracula, directed by Kip Williams. Noel Coward Theatre, London. Running until late May 2026.