Dracula – Double Bill with Frankenstein

The story of Count Dracula, vampire, who wants to move from Transylvannia to more pleasant surroundings.

Using all the entertainment fireworks of Regency and Victorian theatre – music, comedy, drama, tableaux, song and captivating story-telling – the earliest Fright Night Frisson will be brought back to vivid theatrical life. From 1897, came Dracula, Bram Stoker’s chilling telling of the darkest human obsessions. Stoker’s own theatrical version, performed only once before at the Lyceum by Henry Irving’s company, will form the basis for a new adaptation of this terrifying myth of repression and possession. Bram Stoker was the world’s first great theatre general manager, revolutionising stage practices on stage and front of house, during his tenure at the Lyceum, in companies led by Henry Irving and Ellen Terry. From the moment he first saw Irving in Hamlet in Dublin in 1876, through to Irving’s death on tour in Bradford in 1905, the two were inseparable, and Irving was one of the principle influences in the creation of Dracula. In order to secure the dramatic copyright for his story, Stoker compiled his own version, and a reading was performed in front of a minuscule audience in the Lyceum, given by Irving’s company. This text will be adapted by Dominic Dromgoole, and the reading at the Lyceum will be the starting point for this new telling. With a single company telling these two epic stories in London’s most Gothic auditorium, there is the chance, for those brave enough, of seeing both on Saturdays and Sundays.