REVIEW: FANGS IN THE MACHINE

CYNTHIA ERIVO RETURNS TO THE STAGE IN KIP WILLIAMS' DAZZLING AND DISSORIENTING DRACULA.

★★★★☆

In the age of streaming, when cinema colonizes our living rooms, it takes a particular kind of audacity to insist that theatre is still the most elastic art form of all. The Australian director Kip Williams has built a reputation on precisely that audacity. His feverishly received adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray — starring Sarah Snook and running in the West End before transferring to Broadway — transformed a single performer into a kaleidoscope of selves through a meticulous marriage of live performance and cinematic wizardry.

Now Williams turns his lens, quite literally, to Dracula in a new staging that feels less like a play than a gothic séance conducted inside a film studio. The star medium is Cynthia Erivo, returning to the stage for the first time in over a decade, and playing not one or two but 23 characters across two breathless hours.

The result is frequently thrilling, occasionally frustrating, and never, not for a second, ordinary.

Williams’ signature device remains the same: a vast, looming screen dominates the stage, onto which live camera feeds are projected in real time. Pre-recorded versions of Erivo’s characters bleed into the frame, interacting with her live self in tightly choreographed exchanges. Multiple camera operators weave through the stage like silent phantoms, capturing close-ups that would make a cinematographer sweat.

If your only prior encounter with onstage camera work is the sleek but relatively straightforward integrations seen in productions by Jamie Lloyd — whether in Sunset Boulevard with Nicole Scherzinger, Romeo and Juliet with Tom Holland, or last summer’s volcanic Evita starring Rachel Zegler — then Williams’ aesthetic feels like leaping from a smartphone to an IMAX camera.

This is not merely amplification. It is full-scale hybridization. The stage becomes a film set; the film becomes theatre; and the audience is left in the deliciously strange position of watching both the illusion and its manufacture all at once.

And yet.

For all its ingenuity, the machinery occasionally betrays its ambition. Certain camera angles sit just a fraction too high or too tight, creating uncanny distortions when Erivo’s live figure shares the screen with her pre-recorded doubles. At other moments, a perceptible delay in dialogue between live and filmed selves produces an awkward lag — a conversational hiccup that momentarily punctures the gothic spell. Instead of seamless vampiric seduction, we glimpse the gears turning.

It’s all a bit of a blur, not because the story of Jonathan Harker and Count Dracula is incomprehensible, but because the sensory layering is so relentless that the brain occasionally cries uncle.

Still, the ambition is undeniable. Without this technological architecture, one performer could never convincingly embody the teeming cast of Stoker’s novel. The cameras are not garnish; they are structural. And the operators deserve a curtain call of their own, but they do.

As for those who ask, why force the audience to stare at a screen? The answer is embedded in the very tension of the evening. Because everything — save the pre-recorded elements — is happening right there, in real time. The theatricality lies in the simultaneity.

The greater question hovering over this production was never the tech. It was Cynthia Erivo.

More than ten years have passed since her star-making performance in The Color Purple, where she claimed a Tony Award and vaulted into Hollywood’s orbit. Since then, she has built a formidable screen career, most recently headlining the cinematic adaptation of Wicked.

Theatre may be in her bones, but a decade away from the stage is no small hiatus. When I attended an early preview, the strain showed. Lines faltered. The rhythm felt tentative. Social media, with its customary mercy, buzzed that she was relying on teleprompters (I can confirm that she was). However, that ignored one crucial fact: she is delivering roughly 20,000 words on her own.

Memorizing such a torrent would humble most mortals. Previews, by definition, are laboratories. To judge them as finished artifacts is to misunderstand the ecology of theatre.

Two weeks later, the difference was striking. Erivo had settled into the piece's architecture, her transitions sharper, her authority restored. She does not merely differentiate the 23 characters; she inhabits them with physical precision. Dracula himself emerges not as a cape-swishing caricature but as a voice of velvet menace, intimate and unnervingly calm.

Her control over tone — modulating between epistolary narration and fevered dialogue — anchors the production whenever the technological apparatus threatens to overwhelm it. And yes, there are still moments when the choreography between live and filmed selves feels slightly mechanical. But Erivo’s commitment is absolute. She is, unmistakably, a stage beast.

Given a little more time to metabolize the demands of this marathon, she may yet turn this into something transcendent.

Williams continues to carve out a singular lane in contemporary theatre: adapting canonical novels into high-tech solo epics that collapse the distance between cinema and stagecraft. The vision is bold. The execution, while often dazzling, is not yet flawless.

But perhaps flawlessness is beside the point. Theatre that risks nothing rarely lingers. This “Dracula” — ambitious, overstuffed, occasionally glitchy — will not be easily forgotten. It pushes against traditional theatre and asks what storytelling might look like if we stop treating the stage as sacred ground and start treating it as a laboratory.

I left the theatre impressed, slightly overwhelmed, and oddly invigorated. The blood may not flow perfectly smoothly through Williams’ machine, but it pulses with life.

Dracula - Noël Coward Theatre

Attended on 23 February 2026