If you’ve ever felt Lucy Westenra got a terrible deal (#justiceforlucy and all that), the Lyric Hammersmith’s new spin on Dracula is here to set the record straight. Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s adaptation takes Bram Stoker’s 1897 gothic classic and shifts the focus to the women sidelined in the original. It also joins a lineage of feminist retellings: in Liz Lochhead’s 1985 Dracula, Lucy and Mina embraced their vampiric transformation, while Morna Pearson’s 2023 Mina’s Reckoning was staged with an all-women and non-binary cast — productions that, for all their boldness, received a mixed reception.
Here, Mina (Umi Myers) delivers a moving performance, puppeteering a play within a play, in which the survivors of Dracula’s incursion to London serve up a cautionary tale — and lament Lucy’s fate in long stretches of exposition, a real tension killer. For those familiar with the novel or its many adaptations, the constant need to catch us up on plot points can feel especially tedious. With Mina and Lucy (Mei Mac) at the centre, the ensemble — Jack Myers as Jonathan Harker included — circles in and out as stand-ins for multiple roles, but their presence, and their purpose, feels thin.
But definitely not as thin as the role of the men in this production. In Stoker’s original, Harker, Van Helsing, and Lucy’s various suitors are men of action — rational champions of science and medicine rallying to protect ‘their’ women — while Mina and Lucy, though scandalous for their time, were still bound by the roles of their era. Here, the roles reverse: men are cartoonish, bumbling, and woeful, while Mina is powerful, quick to anger, and prone to man-spreading. The point is obvious, but as countless Hollywood remakes have shown, inversion can be boring. What’s that old adage about good characters?
Other themes are just as clear: a reframing of what frightens us now. Which is still, of course, the fear of the ‘other’, here translated into modern concerns – bodily autonomy, queerness, gender. They’re strong ideas, but ones that could have been delivered with a little more subtlety.
The production does, however, earn points for its horror craft. Dracula himself is an unseen, lingering presence, more monster than Lugosi or Coppola. Director Emma Baggott’s staging leans into red washes of light, creeping monsters, and eerie, rhythmic sound design, punctuated by some well-timed jump scares. It’s a stylish rendition, one I really wanted to love — but unfortunately it takes more than just mood to hold an audience.
