Dracula - Play

Dracula sends a young solicitor on a long journey to close a property deal with a client who keeps no servants, casts no reflection and never appears by daylight, and follows what comes ashore behind him once the count decides to travel.

Harker's host has no intention of letting him leave. By the time the count reaches his new home, a young woman is sickening in ways no doctor can explain, and a small group, her friend, her suitors and an old professor who has seen this before, work out what is hunting her and what stopping it will cost. The play draws on Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, adapted for the stage almost since publication and still among the most frequently staged horror stories.

Performed live, the story trades the effects of the screen for something older and more unsettling: darkness, suggestion, and a monster usually just out of sight. Its preoccupations have not dated: contagion, desire, fear of the outsider, and the confidence of rational men out of their depth. It rewards audiences who like their horror atmospheric rather than explicit, and who enjoy watching a room work hard to frighten them.