Dracula under the stars at Brighton Open Air Theatre

If you fancy a bit of Gothic drama under the stars, there's a date worth circling this week. British Touring Shakespeare is bringing their open-air production of Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' to Brighton Open Air Theatre on Thursday 3 September, as part of their 2026 UK summer tour. The performance starts at 7:00pm and runs for two hours and fifteen minutes, with doors opening an hour before the curtain goes up.

The venue is Brighton Open Air Theatre, over on Dyke Road in Hove, BN3 6EH. Tickets are £17 full price, £16 concession, and £12 for young adults aged 16 to 25, though those young adult places are limited to 25 per performance. It's suitable for ages 12 and up, so it works as a family outing as much as a night out with friends.

What's interesting about this version is how it reshapes the story. The plot follows Mina Harker, here cast as a celebrated vampire hunter, who has been invited to address a Victorian scientific society. As the members listen to her account of her fight with the sinister Count Dracula, they're chilled to the bone. David Hobbs MBE, who co-adapted the script, says the production keeps Mina as the driving force behind the hunt while staying true to Stoker's original novel. He also points to the maritime sequences, from the language and dialogue to the staging of the voyage of the Demeter, which have been worked on for authenticity so the audience sees the story much as Victorian readers would have imagined it.

Emma Riches, who plays Mina, describes her as a fascinating character to take on because she's at the heart of the fight against Dracula. She's promised a production full of suspense and adventure, and notes that performing it beneath the evening sky in Brighton, where the atmosphere becomes part of the story, should make for a thrilling experience. The whole point of the open-air setting is to let the night sky do some of the work for you, which is hard to beat when you're dealing with a vampire.

It's worth knowing who's behind it, too. British Touring Shakespeare is an internationally acclaimed open-air touring company with more than 25 years of experience bringing classic stories to outdoor audiences, and they're working in partnership with Facsimile Productions. Back in 2020, they were the first company to return to live open-air theatre as the industry began to recover from the pandemic, so they know their way around an outdoor stage.

As for the man behind the monster, Bram Stoker was an Irish writer, lawyer, literary critic and theatre director, best known for the 1897 gothic horror novel that gave us Count Dracula. He was born in Clontarf, on the outskirts of Dublin, and died in London five days after the sinking of the Titanic. His original 541-page manuscript turned up in a Pennsylvania farmhouse in the early 1980s and was later bought by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, while his research notes are kept at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia. It's a fitting backdrop for a story that's still finding new ways to land on stage.