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by Gordon Greenberg & Steve Rosen, directed by Gordon Greenberg

Menier Chocolate Factory, London, GBR

March 18-May 3, 2025

Dracula: “That is what I truly crave, Mr. Harker; the love, the companionship, the taste of that one special person”

I would not normally seek out a lightweight American comedy to see while in London, but Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors has one major selling point. It stars Canadian actor James Daly, well know at the Shaw Festival and at Stratford, as Dracula. Daly created the role off Broadway and was the only one of the original cast members to travel with the show to London. As it turns out, the show is a hoot. If you’re in London looking for 90 minutes of mindless fun, this is it.

The show is basically a farcical take on Bram’s Stoker’s 1897 novel and on the classic 1931 film. Seemingly inspired by Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show (1973), authors Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen have reimagined Dracula as an alluring bisexual hunk, with Jonathan Harker and his fiancée Lucy Westfeldt as his Brad and Janet equivalents. Seemingly also inspired by the Patrick Barlow’s The 39 Steps (2005), the play bursts with theatricality with four members of the five-member cast playing two to four roles. It is this theatricality that raises the show from a simple spoof of an easily satirizable subject to an enjoyable celebration of all that budget theatre can accomplish.

Like the novel and the film, the play begins with Harker’s coach ride to Dracula’s castle in Transylvania and his first encounter with the Count. Harker has come to sell Dracula real estate in England (where the Count hopes to find new victims). Dracula is particularly entranced by a portrait of Harker’s fiancée Lucy, who has the most beautiful neck. Meanwhile, back in Whitby, Lucy longs for the return of Jonathan and her oversexed sister Mina longs to meet any man. Lucy’s father is the upright Dr. Westfeldt, who runs a lunatic asylum. His advanced notion is to rehabilitate his patients by allowing them to work as servants in his home. One of the most notable of these is Renfield, a man obsessed with consuming insects.

Dracula arrives in England having been shipwrecked off the coast of Whitby. Soon he becomes the object of desire of all three young people – Lucy, Mina and Jonathan. When Mina comes down with a mysterious illness, Westfeldt sends for the famed Dr. Van Helsing, not realizing, male chauvinist as he is, that this Van Helsing is a woman. Van Helsing determines that Mina is the victim of a vampire and she knows that the Westfeldt’s new Transylvanian neighbour must be the culprit.

Greenberg and Rosen use a wide range of comic techniques both physical and verbal. Both Dracula and Mina are prone to slips of the tongue. Dracula tells Harker, “That is what I truly crave, Mr. Harker; the love, the companionship, the taste of that one special person”. When Harker questions the word “taste”, Dracula replies, “I’m sorry, the trust of that one special person”. The sex-starved Mina, meanwhile, makes one not-so-accidental Freudian slip after another.

Greenberg and Rosen make fun of rampant 19th-century misogyny through the expectation that Lucy, who has a degree in microbiology from Oxford, will have to settle down to being a housewife after marrying Harker. Westfeldt can’t hide his disgust when he finds that Dr. Van Helsing is a woman, though, in an unusual plot twist, he and Van Helsing find they are mutually attracted.

Following the usual approach in comic adaptations of classic works, Greenberg and Rosen fill the dialogue with anachronisms. Dracula turns off the music in his castle via Alexa. A bit peckish, the sensitive Harker asks Dracula, “You wouldn’t happen to have anything gluten free, cruelty free vegan, non-gmo, and certified organic, would you?” A little of this goes a long way since it has little to do with the storytelling.

Where Greenberg and Rosen succeed is in heightening the theatricality of the staging which includes the doubling of roles. If a hazy atmosphere is needed, actors use spray cans to fill the air with mist. As if to amplify the show’s theme of sexual fluidity, the older of the two female actors plays three male roles – the Captain of the ship carrying Dracula, Dr. Westfeldt and his patient Renfield. The older of the two male actors plays two female roles – Mina Westfeldt and Dr. Van Helsing. The young female actor plays one male role – Harker’s Coachman in Transylvania – and two female roles – Lucy Westfeldt and the maid Kitty. Only the younger male actor plays only male roles – Jonathan Harker, the Bosun of the ship, a Gravedigger and all three of Mina’s Suitors.

The ruses necessary for these actors to play so many roles are a major source of humour. In order for Van Helsing to examine the ailing Mina, a very obvious doll has to stand in for Mina. For the younger male actor to play all of Mina’s suitors, he wears two life-sized mannequins on either side and uses what ventriloquism he can manage to have them reply. The older female actor who plays both Dr. Westfeldt and Renfield requires frequent quick costume changes, often exiting as Westfeldt and immediately re-entering as Renfield. Two of these quick changes were so unbelievably rapid they caused huge rounds of applause.

The key to making a show like this work is to ensure that everyone in the show has tuned their performances to the same level of camp, exaggerated but not over the top. As director, Greenberg has achieved this with all of the actors most of the time which gives the show a cohesiveness that raises it out of the ordinary.

Though the cast must work as a finely tuned ensemble given all the character changes and physical comedy involved, the show does stand or fall based on its Dracula. There is no surprise why Greenberg asked James Daly to star in the show’s London premiere. It’s very hard to think who else could possibly play the role as it has been reimagined. It needs an actor who is tall, handsome and shredded and who can act both seriously and with a sly sense of self-parody. James Daly exactly fits that description (and can sing and dance though, sadly, the show provides no showcase for those talents). I saw the show only eight days after it opened and Daly first entrance was greeted with cheers as if he were already a star. Daly lapped it up as indeed his ultra-narcissistic character would.

Daly has the great ability to have Dracula appear dashing, romantic and dangerous one moment and then slightly ridiculous and petulant the next while never losing the character’s overall vitality and allure. His Dracula is a like a stereotypical modern Gen Zer who just happens to be about 500 years old. Daly is able to make this Dracula’s extended-life crisis both serious and funny. “What is the point of living, especially living for so long?” he wonders. New victims in a new country are only partially satisfying. Daly shows that this Dracula is actually seeking purpose. With Lucy, he thinks he has found love.

In complete contrast to Dracula is the timid wimp, Jonathan Harker. Lucy does love him, but it’s clear she wishes he were not such a coward. For many locals seeing Charlie Stemp play such a character would be especially amusing since Stemp, unlike Daly, already is a bona fide West End star, best known for several hit musicals. Stemp is hilarious, deliberately tamping down his native élan to make himself as mousy in appearance and actions as possible. Dracula’s seduction of Harker is probably the highlight of the show. Dracula moving in close to Harker tells Harker he could be so much more that he is if he would only let himself go, while Harker silently dreams of being as powerful as Dracula. When he next appears, the bitten Harker is clad in leather and a plunging shirt just as Dracula was.

Stemp has the chance to display his other talents in the five other roles his plays, most notably in the rapid change of accent from American, to Scottish to British of Mina’s three suitors. In one scene when Harker and two others mime riding horses with their steps imitating hoof beats, Stemp takes off in a short tap routine acknowledging the audience’s familiarity with him as one of the West End’s prime song-and-dance men.

Safeena Ladha is excellent as Lucy. (It’s a mystery why the authors have switched the names of Lucy and Mina from the novel and made Lucy, not Mina, Harker’s fiancée.) Ladha effortlessly reveals Lucy as an intellectual but not so much in the clouds that she doesn’t long for earthly passion. Ladha shows that Lucy does find Harker wanting but hopes he’ll eventually perk up. Meanwhile, it’s fun to see how Ladha shows that Lucy, in spite of conventional morality, can’t help herself from being attracted to so magnetic a presence as Dracula. Ladha very humorously can simultaneously play Lucy as both strong and helpless when alone with the Count.

In the novel Lucy is Mina’s best friend. Here they are sisters and Lucy is the older of the two. In his performance Sebastien Torkia pretty well demonstrates that Mina has inherited all the family’s “excessive genes”. In playing the man-hungry Mina, bouncing about in her extra-flouncy frock and ringleted wig, Torkia’s is the one performance that brushes rather too close to over the top. In Torkia’s other role as Van Helsing, where Torkia is clad in what looks like a warrior dirndl and wig of heavy circumcranial braids, he keeps character under tighter control.

Dianne Pilkington is marvellous in her two main roles as Dr. Westfeldt and Renfield. It’s a great idea to have the same actor play both psychiatrist and lunatic. Pilkington plays Westfeldt as a stuffy, self-satisfied rationalist versus Renfield, whose obsession with insects doesn’t appear too different from Westfeldt’s obsession with order. Pilkington emphasizes Westfeldt’s worst characteristics which are his clear preference of Lucy over Mina and his disgust at discovering Van Helsing is a woman. Torkia and Pilkington do bring much fun, however, to Westfield’s and Van Helsing’s gradually overcoming of their animosity and its turning unusually enough into love.

The cozy 180-seat Menier Chocolate Factory is the perfect venue for this kind of laugh-out-loud show where the audience laughs at least as much at its clever staging as at the innuendo-filled dialogue. The play might seem inconsequential but given developments around the world and in the home country of the creators, a play that takes for granted an audience’s willingness not just to accept but enjoy the characters’ bisexuality and cross-dressing comes off now as brave. We know there are many places today where this innocent romp could not be staged. So, if you in a mood for a break from the stresses of today, this show is just the ticket. Let’s hope it is also the path to greater things for the abundantly talented James Daly.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: James Daly (centre) as Dracula with Diane Pilkington and Safeena Ladha; Sebastien Torkia as Mina, James Daly as Dracula, Charlie Stemp as Jonathan, Safeena Ladha as Lucy and Diane Pilkington as Dr. Westfeldt; Charlie Stemp as Jonathan and James Daly as Dracula. © 2025 Matt Crockett. James Daly as Dracula, © 2023 Matthew Murphy. James Daly as Dracula and Safeena Ladha as Lucy. © 2025 Matt Crockett.  

For tickets visit: www.menierchocolatefactory.com.