19 February 2026

Cynthia Erivo’s one-man Dracula misses the point

Kip Williams’ new adaptation of the classic proves that tech can dull a performance

Dracula is supposed to be terrifying. “Persons of small courage and weak nerves should confine their reading of these gruesome pages strictly to the hours between dawn and sunset,” the Daily Mail cautioned when Bram Stoker first published his novel in 1897. A Transylvanian count who sucks on the blood of young men and women sparked all kinds of Victorian fears about predatory foreigners and sexually transgressive women.

Kip Williams – the Australian writer-director who has adapted the tale for today’s less easily horrified theatre audiences – likes a small cast. In 2024, Sarah Snook played as all 26 characters in his adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Now Williams has got Cynthia Erivo, recently Oscar-nominated for Wicked, to play all 23 characters in a new adaptation of Dracula at the NoëlCoward Theatre: she’s the vampire and the vampire hunter, the biter and the bitten. As in Dorian Gray, large sections of the play have been filmed in advance; cameras follow Erivo around the largely bare set and a moving screen shows an impressively choreographed mix of live and pre-recorded footage. On the screen, several Erivos often appear to be speaking to each other while on stage she stands alone. This is a particularly neat trick at the start of the play, when lawyer Jonathan Harker wonders why the Count doesn’t show up in mirrors.

Erivo is a versatile performer who has won all but the Oscar of an EGOT (a collection of Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards). She uses her powerful voice to flip between accents and transform in a moment from Harker’s whimpering wife Mina to a bellowing monster. She rattles through a huge amount of textual detail, narrated through letters and diaries, at pace.

Her Count Dracula speaks with a Nigerian, instead of a Transylvanian, accent. He sports Erivo’s signature long nails and a bright pink wig designed by Marg Horwell, and his tone is at times camp. In this adaptation it is implied that both Mina and Jack, the doctor, are attracted to people of the same sex; the count urges them both almost sweetly to join him, their secret trysts a symbol of illicit homosexual lust.

There’s nothing wrong with making vampires a bit sympathetic. But they must be scary first. Williams sucks the dread out of the play by relying far too heavily on pre-recorded footage. Many of the wildest moments – the count scaling the walls of the castle upside down, an undead woman flying through the air, snarling fangs poised to bite – are shown only on the screen. Live theatre is inherently tense because of the possibility of things going wrong: here, the most nervous I felt was when Erivo stumbled over her lines.

It’s not helped that Erivo’s expressions, blown up on the large screen, can feel a little flat when we ought to see real grief or terror. The threats of exsanguination and damnation never feel real. Dracula is enjoyable and slick, but it’s hard to be moved by a bad film – up to five Cynthia Erivos at once, in progressively worse wigs – and an empty stage.

[Further reading: I’m Sorry, Prime Minister is missing the drama]