The Scotsman 22 August 2023

Morna Pearson is partial to a bit of True Blood and Buffy The Vampire Slayer. That could be why she did not hesitate when the National Theatre Of Scotland (NTS) asked her if she would like to adapt Dracula for the stage. She said yes instantly.

Her first surprise, though, was to discover she had not read Bram Stoker’s novel as she had believed. Not all of it, anyway. The book on her shelf was an abridged version she had borrowed from her high school library and never taken back. “I will return it,” she laughs. Now she had reason to discover the classic story in its entirety.

“It’s a book you can read multiple times and still get something out of,” she says. “Because it’s such a rich text, I trusted my initial impressions of it, although I could read it again today and think, ‘Oh, I wish I’d done that bit.'” [READ MORE]

By Mark Fisher

MARK FISHER is a freelance theatre critic and feature writer based in Edinburgh and has written about theatre in Scotland since the late-1980s. He is a theatre critic for The Guardian, a former editor of The List magazine and a frequent contributor to the Scotsman and other publications. He is the co-editor of the play anthology Made in Scotland (1995), and the author of The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide (2012) and How to Write About Theatre (2015) – all Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. He is also the editor of The XTC Bumper Book of Fun for Boys and Girls and What Do You Call That Noise? An XTC Discovery Book (both Mark Fisher Ltd).