Digital Dracula: Lots Of Blood Without The Mess!

I loved Dracula: The Untold Story and, if I am guilty of anything, it is viewing this quirky, inspiring production just hours before curtain up on the final performance at Leeds Playhouse.

It is an imaginative re-telling of the Bram Stoker Gothic classic using all the wonderful excesses of digital technology, which means there were no messy violations of any Covid protocols since all bloody scenes were instantly cleared up with a quick press of the delete button!

It was New Year’s Eve, 1965, London, England. Just before midnight, as revellers celebrate the beginning of another year, a young woman enters Marylebone Police Station and confesses to a brutal murder.

She claims to be Mina Harker, the last living survivor of the intrepid group that brought about Count Dracula’s demise some 70 years earlier. But Mina Harker – central to Stoker’s original diary-style novel - has not been seen since 1901. And if she were alive, she would be ninety years old.

It was a mystery of satanic proportions and well above the pay grade of two coppers eager to get home to their own New Year celebrations.

Written and directed by imitating the dog’s co-artistic directors Andrew Quick and Pete Brooks, Dracula: The Untold Story was innovative and hooked you from the beginning with its vibrant, violent graphics but, like eating meat from a supermarket, you didn’t have to contemplate any of the messy slaughter in person!

Imitating the dog utilised cutting-edge digital technology to engage with the dark landscape of Bram Stoker's original novel, injecting it with a visual energy that was brilliantly taken forward by just three actors: Matt Prendergast, Adela Rajnović and Riana Duce.

It will now go on national tour with your next opportunity to see at Liverpool Playhouse, Derby Theatre, Dukes Lancaster, Watford Palace Theatre, Mercury Theatre Colchester and finally The Lowry, Salford Quays.

A fascinating, wonderful evening…..if a tad bloody!

Dracula: The Untold Story
Leeds Playhouse
Last Night Tonight
Tour Dates: www.imitatingthedog.co.uk