After a decade in the crypt, Shake & Stir brings literature’s most famous vampire back to the QPAC stage.

Adapted from Bram Stoker’s 1897 Gothic horror novel by Shake & Stir co-artistic directors Nelle Lee and Nick Skubij, this production premiered in 2015 and has toured to more than 40 Australian cities and towns. The original creative team reunites for this limited season in 2026, the company’s 20th year, led by director Michael Futcher.

Jessica Vickers in Shake & Stir Theatre Co’s Dracula. Photo © Cameron Grant/Parenthesy

Young solicitor Jonathan Harker is sent to Transylvania to sign a contract with the enigmatic Count Dracula. A single night becomes several weeks as Jonathan realises he is being held prisoner in the castle and that there is something inhuman about his otherwise gracious host. After an encounter with nosferatu women who try to suck his blood, Jonathan escapes while Dracula makes his move to England to broaden his dominion.

Recovered from his ordeal and reunited with his love, Mina, Jonathan returns to find that Mina’s dear friend Lucy has become one of Dracula’s victims. Lucy’s former suitor, Dr Jack Seward, has enlisted the help of Professor Van Helsing to track down and destroy the vampire. After Mina, too, is targeted by Dracula, the three men follow him home to Transylvania and defeat him in his castle.

Jessica Vickers in Shake & Stir Theatre Co’s Dracula. Photo © Cameron Grant/Parenthesy

Shake & Stir’s Dracula carries the company’s signature quick pace, linguistic quirks and modern sense of humour. In streamlining the story, characters from Stoker’s book are removed or conflated: Texan Quincey Morris is excised, Lucy’s fiancé Arthur is mentioned but never seen, and Seward is the one to kill Lucy after her transformation into a vampire.

Jonathan’s realisation that his host is an undead monster seems to come without fanfare, and it is unclear what will happen to Mina, given her blood connection with Count Dracula, once he is destroyed. Despite these abridgements, Dracula runs for almost two hours without an interval.

Set design by Josh McIntosh is visually dark, a collage of staircases and archways that create shadows and niches for distinct settings. The set rotates almost constantly, with characters moving up and down the stairs to shift between settings and maintain a sense of physical and narrative momentum.

Costumes designed by Leigh Buchanan include three-piece suits and gowns, a more modern cropped leather jacket for Dracula in his English guise, and torn white dresses for the barefoot nosferatu women.

Nick Skubij as in Shake & Stir Theatre Co’s Dracula. Photo © Cameron Grant/Parenthesy

Lighting design by Jason Glenwright obscures and reveals, casting dramatic shadows or suddenly illuminating Count Dracula lurking in the dark. The vampire appears and disappears in sudden, blinding flashes of light and thick swirls of smoke.

Composition and sound design by Guy Webster build suspense through ominous screeches and whispers, and swelling music. Voiceover narration draws on the original epistolary text.

Nick Skubij has a strong stage presence in the titular role, emerging and disappearing from the swirling smoke and shadows in leather jackets and the gleam of a platinum wig. White makeup, giving him an undead pallor, is accentuated with thick black contouring in the first half of the play, although this is removed for Dracula’s more youthful appearance in London.

Fight and intimacy direction, along with movement coaching, by Nigel Poulton creates some truly skin-crawling scenes of blood-sucking, seduction and violent suppression, particularly those involving Lucy’s transformation and death. A genuine grotesquerie is achieved through the glittering gore on stage.

Nicholas Hope (left), Jessica Vickers and Nick James in Shake & Stir Theatre Co’s Dracula. Photo © Cameron Grant/Parenthesy

Nicholas Hope gives a standout performance in the dual roles of vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing and Renfield, an asylum patient and devoted acolyte of Dracula. Both characters have a heightened energy, but Hope creates an admirable distinction between the fanatical, deranged Renfield and the eccentric intensity of Van Helsing.

Jessica Vickers is also outstanding as Lucy, weakening and becoming increasingly hysterical before an upsetting onstage death, and executing highly physical fight scenes in her undead form.

Nick James’ performance as Dr Jack Seward, Lucy’s former suitor and the overseer of the private asylum in which Renfield is held, is the most naturalistic of the cast.

Ryan Hodson’s Jonathan Harker varies between cheerful optimism and quaking fear, while Loren Hunter brings a grounded, confident energy to his wife, Mina.

Shake & Stir’s Dracula delivers the literary classic with all the scale and spectacle audiences have come to expect from the company’s adaptations: a high-drama retelling that hits the central plot points, garnished with technical showmanship and a contemporary sense of humour.

Dracula is at the Playhouse Theatre, QPAC until 8 November.