French-Norwegian company Plexus Polaire’s puppetry adaptation of Dracula is so exquisitely choreographed, so technically assured, that when the curtain call happens, it is somewhat of a shock that only five people take a bow – and none of them is the undead. Taking as its subject a miniscule portion of Bram Stoker’s novel – the chapters where Lucy Westenra is preyed on by the titular vampire – Dracula: Lucy’s Dream is both a visual and literary tour-de-force, using astonishing puppetry to frame Lucy’s descent into vampirism as an act of violation and psychological devastation.
Plagued by insomnia and nightmares, this Lucy exists in a kind of looking glass world, where many versions of her – some real, some masked, some entirely artificial – are pursued by the looming vampire puppet. This is no Sesame Street Count – elongated, hypermobile, and seemingly able to vanish into a cloud of bats thanks to the play’s astonishing use of lighting and dark space – this Dracula is a terrifying proposition entirely suited to the art of puppetry, in which Exorcist-like contortions and animal metamorphoses lean into the source material’s Gothic sensibilities.
Dracula: Lucy’s Dream recognises Lucy’s fate as a horror story: the kind of nightmare that, in some way, happens to women everywhere. It achieves what the best literary adaptations do – speaking to both the past and the present.
Dracula: Lucy’s Dream, Pleasance at EICC, until 29 Aug (not 19, 26), 5.30pm