A special school preview of Dracula' - a showcase from QUT Acting
Awakened by the unimaginable horrors she's witnessed, Mina Harker demands your attention. You'd be wise to listen close.
The only survivor of the tragic events chronicled in the famous letters, Mina is here to recount her version of Dracula's journey from Transylvania to London. Alongside trusted allies, and in memory of her beloved friend Lucy, they scramble to piece together the truth of his monstrous desires. But is their performance merely a warning – or does it have the power to conjure the dead?
Bram Stoker's novel is built from letters, diaries and newspaper clippings — fragments left by people trying to describe something they can't quite believe. This adaptation keeps that unease and puts it on stage, and QUT's Acting students perform it in the close quarters of the Loft, where atmosphere has to be built from bodies, sound and light rather than spectacle.
Gothic literature sits squarely in senior English, and Dracula gives students a chance to see how a nineteenth-century epistolary novel survives translation into a live, contemporary staging — what an adaptor keeps, cuts and reinvents. For Drama classes, the production is a working demonstration of how tension, atmosphere and horror are manufactured in a small space with limited resources: lighting states, sound design, ensemble physicality and timing.
Warnings
Gender-Based Violence: Visual allusions and references to sexual assault and patriarchal oppression.
Trauma and Death: Depictions of death, including children, alongside grief and distress following trauma.
Gore and Stage Effects: Explicit use of blood and atmospheric jump scares.
Thematic Elements: Abduction, the use of stage weapons, and references to hanging.
Recommended for Years 9–12, subject to content warnings.
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