A review of Dracula: Lucy’s Dream, Fringe 2026

Pitch blackness submerges the room; both a signal that the show is about to begin, and a signal that Lucy’s descent into her dream has already begun.

You’d be forgiven for watching, uncertain, wondering what’s actually happening on stage. Is it projection mapping? mirrors? second actors, or are the puppets already moving?

To be left unsure what is real is how the show begins and how it means to go on, leaving you as shrouded in mystery as Lucy herself.

Surreality of Stagework

The cast don’t want you to ever have a full grasp of what’s happening, to feel like you’re ahead of them in any way.

Highly interpretive and abstracted, Lucy spends her time tormented: running in circles around her living reflections, versions of herself played by actors and puppets alike, weaving between moving pillars and her alter egos, actors slipping in and out of sight, while you get lost in the maze with Lucy.

Actors move around in time with each other to perform wonderfully confusing tricks of the eye, such as mimicking mirrors, appearing and disappearing in hectic movement, and one particularly creepy scene with a crawling demon searching for Lucy.

Thin strips of carefully placed lighting would reveal only what you’re supposed to see, allowing puppeteers to slink in and out of position without your eyes ever being taken away from the centrepiece, whether that be a dog puppet playfully teasing Lucy, ominous bats shrieking in her dreams, or her friends and family trying to wake her, to snap her out of her madness.

Puppetry paranoia

Every glimpse at her waking world is a chance for you to lose yourself in the nightmare; five actors battling with the lifesized puppet as it struggles against them in her fever. So precisely done you could forget the puppet is there.

Yet the puppets are no gimmick, they weave perfectly into the narrative itself.

Lucy’s haunted form in the waking world moves unnaturally and jerkily, like a woman possessed, yet uncanny enough to still feel like it’s her. She floats weightlessly into the air, and slams down on her carers, her psychosis feeling visceral among the muffled shouts for her to wake.

Dracula himself employs his artificial form to torment her, breaking apart into pieces surrounding her, to taunt her with his inevitability, his unnatural body reflecting his supernatural essence.

Dreamlike dread

The play features almost no dialogue, relying entirely on its atmosphere and ambiguity to guide you into the story…although it will leave you lost within it, wondering for days what exactly happened to Lucy.

The music would leave you unnerved by default. Ethereal mystical sounds as she wanders through the hall of mirrors, then suddenly harassing you with tense stings and shrill notes when she’s under attack, lost, helpless in the maze of her mind. Silence and foreboding hums pair with the glimmering lights around the stage, never once letting you forget how deep Lucy is in her oblivion.

The few times dialogue is spoken, it’s done so with purpose, and intent. To explain only what it wants you to believe; that Dracula is an eternal being, who cannot be waited out, who cannot be defeated, who cannot be escaped. 

Yet we never see the antagonist in the waking world, or played directly by the actors.

Is he, like everything else within the experience, a deception? A conjured villain of Lucy’s mind, her own demons surfacing, as she tries to make sense of her internal collapse? Or is Lucy simply the latest victim of the fabled vampire, his powers so hypnotic that even his audience will be left mystified?