Dracula: Lucy’s Dream at Pleasance at EICC – Edinburgh Fringe review

Bram Stoker’s gothic titan has been dissected, reanimated, and staged in near-endless iterations, but Plexus Polaire’s Dracula: Lucy’s Dream takes a curiously hyper-focused approach: staging on a single, sensual sliver of the original novel (the carnal, horrifying undoing of the tragic Lucy Westenra), this puppetry-laced piece constructs a shadowy, unsettling world that feels impeccably on-brand for Stoker’s dark universe.

Visually, director Yngvild Aspeli and her team deliver moments of pure, skin-crawling craft. Almost entirely non-verbal, the piece leans on subtle lighting and arresting design to evoke an ominous nightmare landscape. The single spoken refrain – requesting we “believe in the untrue” – hits on an excellent conceit. In puppetry, after all, audiences willingly lend life to inert forms. Here, as Lucy is systematically drained by the Count, she is replaced by a life-sized puppet, forcing us to watch a living woman rendered literally inanimate: a clever, haunting inversion of the medium.

There are flashes of genuine theatrical brilliance: an amorphous swarm of men invading her space highlights the text’s gendered anxieties, while a towering, arachnid iteration of the Count (I’m going to call him Arach-ula) provides a visceral thrill.

Yet, on a dramaturgical level, the production stumbles. Where grand-scale adaptations have suffered from trying to cram in too much, Lucy’s Dream goes to the opposite end: by stretching a tiny thematic snapshot across a full hour, the piece quickly begins to feel repetitive and surprisingly mundane. A rushed final act fails to save the middle stretch from running out of narrative steam, and one can’t help but wonder if introducing the pivotal character of Mina Harker as a counterpoint might have injected much-needed contrast.

Technically, it is a masterclass in puppet manipulation and atmospheric design. But without a stronger narrative arc to sustain its striking visuals, this dark dream ultimately lacks a bit of bite.

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