Drunk Dracula

Drunk Dracula sets one performer the task of retelling Bram Stoker's vampire story after five shots of whiskey. The plot is the familiar one — a count, an appetite, a trail of victims — but the telling is at the mercy of a narrator steadily losing the thread.

It is a solo comic performance built on an unstable premise: the more the narrator drinks, the further the story slips away. The recognisable beats survive — the castle, the sea crossing, the hunt — but the connective tissue is improvised, so no two tellings arrive at them the same way. The show comes from the company behind Drunk Shakespeare, which applies the same drunken-retelling format to gothic horror instead of the classical canon.

The register is broad, physical and unembarrassed, closer to a raconteur coming apart in public than to a polished routine. Much of the pleasure lies in watching one performer negotiate with their own diminishing coordination while the story lurches towards its ending. It suits an audience that likes its horror silly, its comedy unguarded and its theatre willing to fall over.