Sydney Theatre Company's Dracula transforms Zahra Newman into the iconic vampire and his hunters

The outgoing artistic director of Sydney Theatre Company kicked off the project in 2020 with an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, starring just one actor,, playing all 26 characters. The astonishing feat was achieved through a combination of live performance and live and prerecorded video, which Williams dubbed "

" how we can take something that we're afraid of within ourselves and project it into a monster. And in attempting to defeat that monster, therefore, deny that it exists within us," he says. At the centre of Williams's telling of Dracula is the virtuosic Zahra Newman, who embodies all 23 characters. She's the alluring villain Dracula and his unwitting prey — naive solicitor Jonathan Harker, his fiancée Mina and her confidante Lucy. She also embodies a string of Lucy's suitors tracking the vampire, including Dr Jack Seward, as well as vampire hunter Van Helsing.

For instance, there are moments when she needs to perform perfectly to time and to exact marks as she acts alongside a multiplicity of prerecorded versions of herself. "Dracula lives on, there are these versions of vampires that exist within our cultural memory and our cultural storytelling. There's a reason that people are still attracted to that. And you want to do that as a performer: being able to play a bad guy that everyone loves."Newman thinks people remain fascinated with vampires — from Twilight to Interview with the Vampire — because they symbolise ideas about "stepping into realms we're not supposed to go into".

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