A new adaptation of Dracula will evoke Bram Stoker’s Victorian England and will pit scientific advancement against superstition at Newcastle-under-Lyme’s New Vic.
The play, adapted and directed by the theatre-in-the-round’s artistic director Theresa Heskins, will feature “spectacular” aerial sequences, a “chilling” musical score and live sound effects.
Theresa Heskins said, “our affiliation with the National Theatre Studio made me want to challenge myself in new ways. I shared that spirit of adventure with our resident team, asking them to join me in a trip outside our comfort zone.
“Dracula is in keeping with all our ‘house style’ work in that it invites our audience to engage their imaginations, but it will also offer them something which I believe will be entirely new to them—as, indeed, it’s been to those of us making it.”
The production will include a series of aerial sequences devised by Vicki Amedume of Upswing who previously taught the New Vic to fly in Bryony Lavery’s adaptation from Magdalen King-Hall’s novel The Wicked Lady in 2009 and Theresa Heskins’s version of Peter Pan in 2010.
The cast of Dracula features Jasmine Blackborow in her professional debut, Jonathan Charles who was in Mary Orton’s The Borrowers at the New Vic in 2014, Jack Klaff, Hazel Lam, Sophie Morris, John O’Mahony who played Bohr in Copenhagen and Arnold in Alphabetical Order, two Michael Frayn plays produced by the New Vic in 2010, Rebecca Rennison, Sarah Schoenbeck, who appeared in Somerset Maugham’s The Breadwinner at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond in 2013, Isaac Stanmore who was Saul in Jacqueline Wilson’s Hetty Feather at the Vaudeville Theatre in the West End and Ali Watt whose previous New Vic appearances include The Borrowers and Where Have I Been All My Life? by Alecky Blythe in 2012.
Dracula runs at the New Vic from Friday 6 March until Saturday 28 March.