2 days Ago By Louise Rugendyke
Zahra Newman is describing the nightmare she had last night. For someone who is in the middle of rehearsing Dracula , it is not the blood-soaked nightmare one would expect. Nor do her teeth (or should that be fangs?) fall out in an anxiety-riddled fever dream.
“I thought I’d learnt the whole play,” she says. “But then, actually, I realised that I only learnt Harker. That was my nightmare last night, that actually we were getting to tech and it was like, ‘No, Zahra, there’s a whole extra bit.
There’s three quarters of a play to go.’” Zahra Newman (with prosthetic dentistry) is starring in Sydney Theatre Company’s Dracula. Credit: Dominic Lorrimer As Newman recounts her dream, director Kip Williams chuckles away.
Dracula is the final piece in his Sydney Theatre Company Gothic trilogy, which started with The Picture of Dorian Gray in 2020, and continued with 2022’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde . Like those two productions, Dracula is also adapted from a Victorian classic – Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel – and it deals with the monster that lurks within us all. “ Dorian is very much about the relationship that an individual has with themselves and how they navigate that interior dialogue and express it in the public sphere,” says Williams.
“ Jekyll is very much about the compartmentalisation of self and those rare friendships that you find where you can express yourself authentically. “And Dracula is much more about the element of yourself t.
