‘It still haunts me’: a Dracula puppet show that is not for young children | Edinburgh Festival 2026

WWho is your Dracula? Max Schreck’s toothy Nosferatu, Bela Lugosi in a tux, the lantern-jawed host of Hotel Transylvania? The director of the theater said the director of the play Yngvild Aspelwho is bringing a blood doll to Edinburgh on the verge of summer. “There were vampire stories long before Bram Stoker but he gave them new life.”

After watching his very scary show Dracula: Lucy’s DreamA scary pitch, life-size doll to me has been as indelible as Gary Oldman in a top hat or Christopher Lee with a gleeful grin. It echoes Jonathan Harker’s assessment of the scope of Stoker’s novel: “The results were very impressive.” I saw this display on a trip to Paris a few months ago and it still haunts me: I could swear that this Drac disappeared and then reappeared before my eyes, it is the masterpiece of the French-Norwegian company Aspeli Plexus Polaire. Thanks in part to the light of Emilie Nguyen, amazing transformations take place, actors and puppets are often unknown.

“Dracula is a good character for a puppet,” said Aspeli, in a video from Norway, because an inanimate object “needs actors of blood and flesh to come to life”. Aspeli based the 1901 Icelandic translation, Powers of Darkness, in which Valdimar Ásmundsson “did a lot, adding and changing characters” to Stoker’s original. While the latest Morgan Lloyd Malcolm feminist revival at the Lyric Hammersmith assigned Mina Harker to direct the story, the novel has Mina’s best friend Lucy at its heart. Stoker’s evil Lucy goes from happily receiving three weddings in one day to sleeping and being vampirised by Dracula. But Aspeli’s creations often “remove the female form from the victim’s place” she says. “Not to change the story, but the attitude.” On stage, the result is the opposite of the male scientists who lead the story – and women.

Stoker, who was also a theater director, portrayed Dracula as a master puppeteer. “This trick question will always be relevant,” says Aspeli. Her retelling highlights the trauma and how emotional abuse “can control you even if it never happens again – what does that do to your body and mind afterwards?” This has been a long-standing interest and informed the company’s name when it was launched in 2008. “The solar plexus (solar plexus) is where the mind resides in the body.” But polar? “I work with polarity – in all my shows there is a balance between madness and madness, reality and illusion.” (Aspeli’s feverish version of A Doll’s House has Nora dancing the tarantella, as in Ibsen’s play, and takes them as a way to represent the spider that gives the dance its name.)

Dracula: Lucy’s Dream depicts a world of space, so familiar that it’s surprising when only five people come to safety, exhausted – they’ve been incredibly active in and out of the shadows. Resources, too, are limited. It’s all similar to the imagination – “the power of illusion” says Aspeli. “I love the old-school style of toys and how you can make something out of nothing.”

The size of the puppets, he says, is essential to any production. “If you were an actor controlling a very small puppet, it says something different about the relationship. The big puppets of his life, inspired by bunraku traditionthey are designed to be as light and naturally accurate as possible to ensure real movement.

As in the book, sound plays a big role in Dracula – there is a loud howl and an eerie song composed by Ane Marthe Sørlien Holen, The Children of the Night, a description that Stoker’s Dracula uses when Jonathan hears wolves howling. As a little girl, Aspeli was only afraid of wolves and scolded a terrible monster called Gmork in The Neverending Story. “That was my dire wolf!”

Since Plexus Polaire was founded, Aspeli has seen puppetry’s reputation grow as an art form for adults. On the edge – where he has previously performed with UK recording outfit Jammy Voo (“so I know the roofs are leaking!”) – will perform in the 1,200 capacity venue at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre. It is not a niche concept. “This is something that has taken a long time, but art can exist in the same way, and in the same place, as other theaters.”

The idea that toys are not fun for children can be established, he says. “But that’s what needs to be said, ‘Don’t send your young children to Dracula!'” he laughs. “I take no responsibility!”