Dracula: Lucy’s Dream – Pleasance at EICC ★★★★★

For all the fascination surrounding Dracula himself, Bram Stoker’s novel belongs just as much to Lucy Westenra. Before Mina becomes the heroine of the story, it is Lucy who experiences its strange seduction most acutely. Desired by three men, consumed by Dracula and transformed into something both monstrous and alluring, she sits at the point where Victorian anxieties about female sexuality, desire and control collide. More than a century later, those tensions remain compelling because they never really disappear. The vampire survives because it embodies contradiction. We are simultaneously repelled and attracted, terrified and fascinated. It is those contradictions that Yngvild Aspeli’s extraordinary Dracula: Lucy’s Dream pursues. This is not an adaptation interested in narrative clarity or literary fidelity. Instead, it seeks to capture the logic of dreams, where images surrender themselves to emotion, where fear slips seamlessly into desire, and where reality is repeatedly…