☆☆☆☆☆

Reviewing The Mystery of Dracula means bending the rules, for it is only very loosely a magic show. From the minds of the Alnwick team, the Fringe’s favorite genre-bending siblings, it’s a slight deviation from their theatrical magic offerings of recent Fringes into more of a proper play, albeit told using magic. Magician David Alnwick is here a researcher investigating the origins of the Dracula story, and along the way illustrates his occult findings with stage magic. It’s a style of performance that he has honed over the past few Fringes and it shows. Like seemingly everything that Alnwick produces, the magic itself is flawless, and the storytelling aspect is equally perfectly performed.

As the public have come to expect, the Mystery of Dracula is nothing short of a triumph from concept to performance. Alnwick uses magic sparingly. The mentalism cards he uses in an early effect may look familiar to magic fans, but what is unfamiliar is just how perfectly placed they are in the narrative—plucked from Alnwick’s extensive repertoire for their important role in the story. Alnwick tells the history of magic alongside that of Dracula, and indulges the audience in a display of Victorian-style escapology along the way. It seems a bit random at first, but by the end of the hour is revealed to be a crucial element of the final effect.

There would have been no room for Alnwick to hide if his magic were anything less than flawless due to how little of it is used, but luckily that is never a concern. Dracula is as much a story about the origins of magic and their interconnection to occult beliefs as it is a magic show. Alnwick has never really needed magic to hold an audience’s attention, at least not for as long as this publication has been reviewing him, and this is the proof of it. If it’s more a story than magic, it’s difficult to imagine anyone other than a magician thinking to tell it; and if they did they wouldn’t tell it with nearly as much passion or insight as Alnwick.

It’s easy to dismiss a magician’s stories as more fiction than fact, the necessity of their tricks outranking any need for truthfulness. However, watching Dracula with a Yorkshire local reveals that the settings that Alnwick describes are at least real, the photographs are indeed recognizable as actual locations in the town of Whitby. Hopefully Alnwick has arranged to receive referral fees for customers of one particular restaurant that will undoubtedly receive an influx of new customers after this show.

For Alnwick fans, Dracula fans, and indeed every discerning Fringe fan, The Mystery of Dracula is a must-see show this Fringe. It’s perfectly balanced, not quite so scary as his proper horror or so comedic as his lighter-hearted shows. Alnwick doesn’t look to be giving up his place of prominence in the Fringe magic scene anytime soon.