Before going into rehearsals, Dracula director Eliot Giuralarocca picked out seven seemingly impossible challenges from the script.

“Every day during the three weeks we would do some of the easy staging and then try to work out how to do one of the challenges,” he says.

“We ended up with ideas that I hope are quite simple and beautifully done, but to get to that place we had to go through five or six days of rubbish!”

The challenges ranged from an onstage beheading to interpreting adapter John Ginman’s stage direction “they travel from London to Transylvania”. They all proved to be knotty problems for the director of the Blackeyed Theatre production and his five-strong cast.

“Blackeyed Theatre is well-known for using actor-musicians, so I knew we had the resource of music,” says Giuralarocca, on a break from rehearsals of Michael Frayn’s farce Alarms And Excursions in Chipping Norton.

“I wanted quite a pure storytelling piece, with the actors telling the story, not hiding anything from the audience and embracing the theatricality of that idea.

“I couldn’t rely on costumes or light. Whenever you do anything supernatural on stage you can’t make it half-hearted as audiences are quick to say, ‘This is dreadful.’ You have to do something you can be proud of, and you get a grudging respect for that – at least that’s what I’m banking on!”

As well as returning to the original horror novel for inspiration, Giuralarocca researched the performance styles popular on the Victorian stage and has woven music hall, Grand Guignol, illusions, shadowplay and even early silent cinema into the production.

“Something that surprised me when I went back to the novel is that it is written through letters,” he says. “It makes it quite subjective.

“We made the decision early on that props would be on show and handed to characters as they needed them to celebrate the theatricality of the storytelling.”

Arch-enemies

With only five actors on stage for a story with such a wide canvas, there is understandably some doubling up.

And in some ways Giuralarocca made his job even harder by deciding the arch-enemies Dracula and Van Helsing should be played by the same actor.

“I was surprised when I read the novel that Dracula hardly ever appears,” he says. “He doesn’t speak, you don’t get anything from his perspective. He appears in all the other characters’ letters almost as a character they have created. It’s a bit like the definition of the devil as everything you fear.

“Dracula and Van Helsing are two sides of the same coin – Van Helsing is this fanatical vampire hunter who has become obsessed with killing this evil, while Dracula is hell-bent on survival by drinking blood and draining energy from other people.”

Dracula’s victims, Jonathan Harker and the insane Renfield, are also played by the same actor. “If Harker didn’t have Mina to rescue him after he went to Dracula’s castle, he would have ended up like Renfield,” says Giuralarocca, pointing to Francis Ford Coppola’s film version, which portrays Renfield as Harker’s predecessor at the same law firm, who is also sent to convince the Count to sign some important papers – the seemingly innocent activity which sets the murderous train of events in motion.

The stage production is little more than two hours long – a return to the book’s pacy origins.

“Stoker’s Dracula is not the story people are familiar with,” he says. “It’s not about blood or vampires or the iconography that has built up around the story.

“It’s a thriller – a Victorian melodrama. We had to keep pushing the story, so even if you know what’s going to happen next, you are surprised at how it happens.”

  • Blackeyed Theatre’s Dracula also visits The Hawth, in Hawth Avenue, Crawley, on Wednesday, February 26 (£15, call 01293 553636), and the Connaught Theatre, in Union Place, Worthing, on Friday, March 7, and Saturday, March 8 (£14.50, call 01903 206206).