Review: DRACULA, Lyric Hammersmith

Marc Brenner

There’s always a danger with Dracula that you end up with a pantomime cape, a flash of fangs, and not much else. What the Lyric Hammersmith’s new production manages, under Emma Baggott’s direction and Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s pen, is to drag Bram Stoker’s old monster out of the coffin and hold him up to the light of 2025. And the surprise is that the thing still twitches.

This is a production built on contrasts. Grace Smart’s set looks skeletal, more bones than flesh, which makes every shaft of Joshie Harriette’s lighting feel like an intrusion. The darkness is never quite safe, but nor is the brightness. Adam Cork’s sound design slips under your skin – sometimes a low vibration that makes you clench your jaw, sometimes a sharp crack that feels like it came from the seat behind you. There’s restraint here, which is clever; they trust your imagination to do half the work, and it usually does.

What really sharpens this version, though, is its framing. The story is retold by Mina herself, speaking directly to a new audience, something she seemingly does all the time now, telling her story over and over again to anyone who will listen – and pay – and that change makes everything feel both more personal and more slippery. There’s also a deliberate streak of humour running through it – jokes and asides that let you relax, even laugh, before the rug is pulled. The result is that the scares land harder, because they arrive out of a false sense of safety, as if the theatre has conspired to trick you along with the characters. 

And there’s a neat twist, too – one that, as the play goes on, becomes more and more obvious, but that still has the power to take the whole story onto darker, stranger ground in a satisfying way. 

The cast are given more than stock gothic caricatures. Umi Myers’s Mina isn’t just a bystander scribbling notes, but a woman trying to wrestle with forces far larger than herself, and refusing to be erased. Mei Mac makes Lucy’s descent compelling and strange, less the swooning victim and more a figure pulling away from her own world. Phoebe Naughton takes Van Helsing’s certainty and twists it into something sharper, less heroic than you might expect. Even B Terry’s Renfield gets room to move beyond the usual twitching oddball, offering flashes of something disturbingly human.

It isn’t seamless. The pacing sometimes stumbles, particularly in the second act where long stretches of dialogue take the air out of what should feel claustrophobic. There are moments where the production’s stripped-back aesthetic tips into sparseness, when you wish the stage had more bite, more texture, instead of leaning so hard on suggestion. And while the rebalancing of the story towards the women is refreshing, it occasionally makes the Count himself feel less central, less threatening, when he should be the dark star pulling everything into orbit.

But there are scenes that make you sit forward. A shadow falling across Lucy’s bed with the smallest shift of light. A scream cut short by silence. A gesture that makes you wonder whether the fight against Dracula is as much about power as it is about monsters. Those moments remind you that theatre can still scare, not by showing you the horror, but by letting your brain conjure it in the half-light.

This Dracula doesn’t offer perfection, and it doesn’t want to. What it offers is a retelling that feels alive, that takes old bones and makes them creak again. You leave not with the memory of a rubber bat on a string, but with an unease that clings for longer than you expected. And maybe that’s the real victory – the sense that Dracula himself (or rather, someone very like him) has followed you out into the night air.

**** Four Stars

Reviewed by Lisamarie Lamb

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