When you take the walk from Hackney Central through a moderately creepy garden to get to the oddly placed Sutton House, it’s difficult to know what to expect from Dracula. How can Bram Stoker’s Gothic horror be convincingly transposed to a Tudor house in the middle of urban Hackney? It turns out with innovation and masterful storytelling courtesy of the Tea Break Theatre Company, who use this setting as the central tool for breathing fresh life into this classic tale about the undead.

Upon entering the house, you are greeted by the eternally cheerful and somewhat scatter-brained Elizabeth (Louise Wilcox), the audience’s tour guide, who proceeds to show the audience around the house. The first part of Dracula is a realistic depiction of a British Museum tour filled with the usual cheesy jokes reminiscent of your primary school trip to the V&A. The tour group also has the archetypal museum visitors, the ‘keeno’ who keeps asking weird questions, the couple who are too affectionate and the girl who just doesn’t want to be there. As the audience’s eyes wander, taking in the eye rolls of their colleagues, the wooden panels on the wall and the regal looking furniture, a shriek from the back of the room jolts them to attention, interrupting the mundanity of the tour guide’s speech. And these stock audience members begin to animate more vigorously, revealing themselves to be actors. We are introduced to a group of friends who look like young professionals who’ve just moved to Peckham: Lucy (Jennifer Tyler), Abraham Van Helsing (Jon-Paul Rowden), Arthur (Jeff Scott), Jonathan Harker (Christopher Dobson), Mina (Molly Small) and Dr Jane Seward (Angela Nesi). No sooner after the group has taken a selfie by the window, the play accelerates, descending into Hackney’s answer to the Blair Witch Project. And the members of the audience bear witness to a struggle against the forces of evil that has spanned hundreds of years.

The production’s pacing of events and mastery of the setting deserves the highest level of commendation. Sutton House, which is foreign to audience members, is at times a single room, which they and the characters are confined to. But then becomes, a moment later, an expansive manor filled with dark corners and secrets rooms at every turn. The cast splits up the audience, giving some members key information while withholding it from others to create an individual experience for all. And the cast is phenomenal, transforming from hipsters contemplating packing it in and just going to the pub, to Elizabethan nobles. Wilcox’s Elizabeth’s transformation from chirpy tour guide to mental health hospital patient is particularly astonishing.

Dracula’s reimagining by the Tea Break Theatre questions the heteronormative presentation of the characters in the original story and thus maintains the spirit of Sutton House Queered, a programme that focuses on the history and culture of LGBTQ communities. The result is more nuanced characters and greater depth added to the theme of repression, which is prevalent throughout the story.

Dracula is a treat packed with scares and tension that will make your walk back to Hackney Central station a frightful one.

Dracula is playing at Sutton House until November 4 2017. 

Photo: John Wilson