By Helen Musa

With, as they’re saying, five actors, 15 characters and one extremely hot vampire, Canberra Rep’s choice of Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors as its pre-Christmas play is almost bound to pack them in.

Like the version of Around the World in 80 Days, just staged by Honest Puck Theatre, also performed with five actors, this script by Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen is predicated on familiarity with the original.

But in a bawdy, high-camp move, the writers have swapped some of the characters around and transformed Bram Stoker’s suave but foul-smelling Count Dracula into an attractively hunky sexpot, described by one American critic as “a sort of Gothic Dolly Levi”.

It’s also packed with witty jokes and Monty Python-inspired physical gags.

When I catch up with director Alexandra Pelvin, a veteran of many Rep productions, including Lizzy; Darcy and Jane; Home, I’m Darling and Hotel Sorrento, I find that the script gave her the opportunity to cast very freely.

It specifies that any gender and any ethnicity can play any role. She has eventually come up with four male actors, Peter Fock, Michael Sparks, Justice-Noah Malfitano and Richard Rae, with one female actor, Ariana Barzinpour. Only Malfitano, as Dracula, plays just one role.

Pelvin admits this is a very loose adaptation of Bram Stoker’s work. In the original, Dracula is a monstrous force of evil throughout, whereas in this version he is the source of a lot of camp fun. But Greenberg and Rosen hardly wrote it for Victorian literature purists.

The play, Pelvin tells me, is built around a series of little relationships, with Lucy, now a feminist heroine, trying to navigate her own path. The 15 different characters all have their own charm, she assures me, and hilarity is the order of the day.

In this version, Lucy’s role is swapped with the Mina of the novel, and it is Lucy, not Mina, who is engaged to Jonathan Harker, the hapless real estate agent who gets packed off to Transylvania to negotiate a contract with the deadly count.

The setting is still Victorian, but there’s a little bit of a steampunk feel about Cate Clelland’s costumes. Michael Sparks’ set adapts very easily to the many scene changes, even the final scene, which jumps between localities.

Audiences will be pleased to hear that all these changes don’t mean endless blackouts.

It’s not easy for Pelvin to identify her favourite scene, but she thinks it might be the one where the inmate in a mental asylum, Renfield, has come under Dracula’s spell and the count visits him in the form of a bat. Now, how is that going to be achieved in the theatre?

It promises to be a gay old time.

Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors, Canberra Rep Theatre, November 19-December 5.

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