Dracula: Lucy’s Dream – A highly intelligent meditation on dominance, control, sacrifice, desire & suffering (Fringe review) 5 Stars *****

Plexus Polaire (Moby Dick, Barbican) is a company that creates life on stage through something akin to conjuring. True masters of puppetry, physical theatre, and storytelling, the company has a performance style that is wickedly incomparable – a sleek, almost inhuman method of moving, doing, and being that vividly creates and breaks back down, over and over again, in a performance spiral that is as gloriously maddening as it is mesmerising.

Positioned as a bleak and beautiful nightmare, Dracula: Lucy’s Dream explores the centuries-old monster story from the doomed perspective of Dracula’s first female victim. The performers move as one to draw the impossible from their puppets and props: hot blood, fear, longing, death, the dark outdoors, confusion, panic, weakness, indifference, desperation, a claustrophobic sick bed.

Floating slips of bloody chiffon and string become gristle; shifting panes of light and dark illuminate grasping hands, a running dog, and a diaphanous grey bat; and Lucy herself comes to life in both human and physically-manipulated forms, a role shared dually by the living cast and a hauntingly crafted puppet.

Dracula himself lurks – tall, oddly alluring, terrifying, never here nor there at any fixed point – in all corners and nooks of the stage, masterfully slithered into and out of view by the company like a ghoul. Leech-like in behaviour, Plexus Polaire position their monster as Lucy’s obsessive tormenter – a grim shadow determined to swallow her whole, soul and all. 

A Fringe Festival stand-out, Dracula: Lucy’s Dream is a highly intelligent meditation on dominance, control, sacrifice, desire, and suffering.

Threaded through with brilliantly considered spooks and scares, light-touch humour through Lucy’s canine companion, and a clearly compassionate take on female suffering, Plexus Polaire’s UK debut of this gothic classic is stunning. 

Dracula: Lucy’s Dream, Lennox Theatre at Pleasance at EICC, until 29th August