Cynthia Erivo’s Dracula was the hardest thing I’ve ever seen done on stage
If a car is wedged in a ditch, you could gather ten people to haul it out with steady, shared effort.
Or you could stand back and watch one Herculean figure strain every sinew, determined to prove they can do it alone. But the car ends up back on the road either way.
In one version, the task disappears and the road trip continues; in the other, the labour itself becomes the spectacle.
That has always been my hesitation with one-person shows. However impressive the feat, the sheer scale of the exertion can eclipse the narrative you came to see.
Instead of surrendering to a story, theatre-goers find themselves watching the trapeze artist and half-bracing for the fall.
That tension hums through the West End’s new adaptation of Dracula at the Noël Coward Theatre, where Cynthia Erivo plays not one role but 23.
Over two relentless hours she shifts between Van Helsing, Mina, Jonathan Harker, Lucy, Renfield, Seward and Dracula himself, barely pausing for breath and never meaningfully leaving the stage.
The production, which opened on February 16, is directed by Kip Williams, a theatre-maker known for his fusion of live performance and video design. Here, that signature style is pushed to its most extreme.
Williams builds the show around a complex dialogue between live action and pre-recorded film, meaning Erivo must not only carve out distinct physical and vocal identities for each character, but also hit cues with forensic precision so that filmed versions of herself can respond in perfect time.
Cameras track her constantly, capturing footage that is projected instantly onto a towering screen, while other sequences have been pre-shot and must align seamlessly with her live delivery.
Certain characters exist only in the filmed realm, never quite sharing the same physical space as the live body before us, a subtle nod to vampiric lore in which some creatures cast no image in mirrors.
Visually, the result is often beautiful, and the solo conceit dovetails neatly with the novel’s epistolary structure: whoever is ‘writing’ a journal entry or letter exists live before us, while the recipients materialise on the vast screen behind, flickering into being like thoughts made visible.
That interplay between presence and projection creates a hierarchy of perspective in which only one viewpoint feels fully corporeal at a time, meaning we are always anchored to a single consciousness, one pen scratching across paper, while the others hover just out of reach.
Additionally, the scale of the projection ensures there are few bad seats in the house, and the interplay between live and filmed action enables flourishes that would be impossible in a conventional staging.
For example, a dreamlike sequence between Dracula and Lucy layers recorded and live movement to disorienting effect, while a brief moment in which Erivo steps to the lip of the stage and sings as Dracula, stripped of technological scaffolding, feels quietly spellbinding precisely because it breaks the pattern.
And of course, Erivo’s excellence is the least surprising element of the evening.
She is magnetic, meticulous, and emotionally lucid throughout, finding flashes of humour and menace even while juggling an almost unmanageable technical load.
At their best, her transformations between characters can be startling, with Jonathan’s nervous energy giving way to Mina’s controlled intelligence with such clarity that it is briefly possible to forget they share a body.
At the same time, the feat has inevitable limits. There are moments that could be deeply resonant in the hands of an actor of Erivo’s ability, that instead seemed rushed or surface-level.
Some male characters, particularly Seward and Harker, blur at the edges, and the first appearance of Van Helsing in long white hair and beard drew involuntary giggles.
There is something faintly cartoonish about some of the disguises, and in those moments, you can sense how precarious the whole enterprise is.
The production lives on a knife’s edge between audacious and absurd, and every so often it wobbles, threatening to tip from bravura into unintended comedy, and this is in part because the technical demands are so formidable.
Each exchange with her on-screen counterparts depends on near-perfect timing, and as a result, over the evening, there were perhaps a dozen noticeable slips: a stumbled word, a rushed beat, a pause hanging slightly too long.
In another context that might feel disruptive, here it seemed remarkable that there were not more, given that Erivo is effectively reciting the better part of a novel while executing intricate blocking and rapid costume shifts.
Still, you could argue that the one-person conceit does more than showcase stamina; it reframes the story in a way that feels thematically pointed.
Dracula is a tale of repression, contagion, and desire pushing against propriety, of identities splitting under pressure.
Watching a single performer embody predator and prey, purity and corruption, shifts the drama inward. Mina and Dracula sharing a face makes their connection feel less like a battle across a room and more like a struggle within one psyche.
The constant doubling — a live body here, a filmed apparition there — reinforces that sense of fragmentation, as though we are witnessing a mind at war with itself.
And with Erivo, openly queer and fluid in her masculinity and femininity, inhabiting every role, the novel’s homoerotic undertones surface with a clarity that feels both modern and radical.
By the final stretch, though, I found myself increasingly aware of the human cost, and when the standing ovation arrived — thunderous and prolonged — the applause carried a note of secondhand exhaustion.
In the foyer afterwards, conversations revolved less around Lucy’s tragedy or Mina’s ordeal than around how Erivo could possibly sustain this for the duration of the run.
In the end, the car does get moved out of the ditch. The narrative lands, the imagery lingers, and the audience leaves impressed – but I would be curious to see this adaptation distributed among a full cast, released from the tension of its own audacity, with some breathing room for a towering talent like Erivo to really act.
Still, if you arrive at the Noel Coward prepared to marvel at the feat as much as to lose yourself in the tale, you may find the sheer audacity of Erivo’s undertaking is worth the cost of admission.
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