★★★★★
Shake & Stir’s Dracula is the best Halloween night out Brisbane has right now, and it isn’t even close.
Bram Stoker’s Count has been bitten, staked and resurrected more times than anyone can count across stage and screen, so it takes something special to make him feel genuinely frightening again. Shake & Stir Theatre Co have built an entire gothic world around him, plunged it into darkness and let him loose.
That’s the thing about this production. It doesn’t just tell you Stoker’s story; it drags you up the stairs, locks the door behind you and blows out the candle.
Shake & Stir have been on a serious run lately, and just when you think they’ve hit their ceiling, they go and build a gothic castle straight through it. This is easily one of the standout shows of my year, and with Halloween around the corner, I genuinely can’t think of a better way to spend a night out. Bring a friend; preferably one you don’t mind clinging to.
Nelle Lee’s adaptation is tight, smart and wastes nothing. Anyone who’s tried to slog through Stoker’s novel knows it’s a story told through letters, diary entries and an awful lot of people writing things down.
Lee strips it back to its beating (or not-so-beating) heart, keeping the dread and ditching a lot of the paperwork. Under Michael Futcher’s direction, the pacing is impeccable. He knows exactly when to let a scene breathe and exactly when to suck the air out of the room entirely.
Josh McIntosh’s set is superb in its simplicity. A fixed gothic castle looms at the back of the stage, while a staircase sits on a revolve that does an enormous amount of heavy lifting. One turn and it’s a jail cell. Another and it’s a labyrinth winding through the bowels of the castle.
There are no clunky scene changes and no stagehands shuffling furniture in the dark, just a slow, ominous rotation that tells you everything you need to know about where you are and how much trouble everyone’s in.
Now, it’s not often I walk out of a show and the thing I can’t shut up about isn’t actually a person. But here we are. The real star of Dracula is Jason Glenwright’s lighting, and I’m only half joking when I say it should’ve been handed a bouquet at curtain call.
Glenwright basically uses darkness as another set piece. He only lights what you need to see and leaves the rest up to you, which, in a show about a bloke who lurks in the shadows, is a pretty cruel trick.
Dracula and the vampires just sort of hang about in corners you didn’t even realise were there, and then a bolt of lightning hits and suddenly they’re right there. There are also these streams of light that come through the gaps in McIntosh’s castle and slice across the stage, and every time a character stepped into one it looked like a painting.
I lost count of how many times the cinematographer in me thought, that’s a gorgeous shot. Occupational hazard, I suppose.
Guy Webster’s sound design deserves a big mention too, because it’s doing a lot of the scaring. The thunder actually rumbles through your seat. The score keeps winding the tension up and up, and the old castle never stops creaking and groaning like it’s got something to say.
Put all of that together with the lighting and the set, and you’ve got one of the spookiest atmospheres I’ve sat in all year.
And the cast are fantastic, every single one of them.
Nick Skubij is a seriously good Dracula. He doesn’t need to do much to be scary, and that’s exactly why he is. There’s a charm to him too, so you sort of get why everyone keeps letting him through the door, even when you’d really rather they didn’t.
Nick Hope has the fun job of playing both Van Helsing and Renfield, which is a big swing considering one’s trying to save the world and the other’s eating bugs. His Van Helsing is all steely determination, and his Renfield is gloriously unhinged. I honestly didn’t even realise it was the same guy until the final bows!
Ryan Hodson’s Jonathan Harker is the poor fella who walks into the castle first, and he plays him with enough decency and nervous energy that you feel for him from the get-go.
Loren Hunter is lovely as Mina. She’s the calm, clever centre of everything, and she holds the story together while the rest of the world falls apart around her.
Jessica Vickers was a real highlight for me as Lucy. Her transformation is genuinely creepy, and she pitches it just right. Never too over the top, but unsettling enough that you’ll think twice before opening a window tonight.
Nick James rounds it out as Jack Seward, and there’s a real heartbreak to his performance as he watches things slip further and further out of his control.
Shake & Stir Theatre Co keep raising their own bar, and I’m starting to wonder if there’s actually a ceiling at all. Dracula is dark and spooky and exactly what you want from a night at the theatre in the lead-up to Halloween.
Go see it. Just maybe don’t walk home through the Southbank Parklands afterwards.
Dracula is presented by Shake & Stir Theatre Co and runs to 8 November 2026 at the Playhouse, QPAC.
Tickets: https://www.qpac.com.au/whats-on/2026/shakestir-dracula
Website: https://shakeandstir.com.au/mainstage/dracula
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/atqpac/ and https://www.instagram.com/shakeandstir/
Photo credits: Cameron Grant
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