Mark Bruce may be one of many choreographers to base a work on Bram Stoker's Dracula, but out of all the vampire dances I've seen, his goes most deeply and most terrifyingly into the bodies and souls of the undead.

Even if there are brief sections where the staging feels overcomplicated by the parallel settings, characters and plots of the original, Bruce and his extraordinarily gifted dancers and design team navigate the material with near-hallucinatory dexterity. The smoky, candlelit atmosphere of Wilton's Music Hall is clearly the ideal venue for this show, yet even in other venues the brilliantly imagined masks and props and gothic, fin de siècle set, would still conjure Stoker's world to compelling effect.

Individual scenes are outstanding – the juggernaut stage fight in which Jonathan Harker and his friends attempt to subdue Dracula, or the lurching carriage ride in which three horse-masked dancers pound through a hellish roar of sound. The gore is unnervingly realistic throughout. Essentially, however, it's out of pure movement that Bruce creates his most powerful drama.

The three vampire brides are horrifying not simply because of their dead eyes and their slutty, blood-smeared mouths, but because their bodies are graphically in thrall to a ravening twitching – a hunger that can never be sated. As for Jonathan Goddard's Dracula, it must surely go down as one of the great performances of the year. This immensely elegant dancer moves as if possessed by all the forces of evil, combining a fang-like sharpness with a thuggish, monstrous strength, flashing with scintillating mockery, but evoking a spiritual emptiness that makes him look a thousand years old. This Dracula may be staged with the most low-tech means, but it raises the bar of dance theatre very high.

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