By whom? Joseph O'Connor.

Published when? In 2019.

Absorbed how? Via an audio-version that was beautifully narrated by Barry McGovern and Anna Chancellor.

About what? The career of Irish author Bram Stoker (1847-1912), as it intersected with the life and times of renowned actors Sir Henry Irving (1838-1905) and Dame Ellen Terry (1847-1928).

Read why? I'd liked what I'd read of O'Connor so far (My Father's House). And this one seemed to be rated: It was on the 2020 shortlist for the Walter Scott Prize, and was named novel of the year at the Irish Book awards for 2019. I was also interested in Bram Stoker. I had read and enjoyed Dracula after a wonderful week in Whitby in 2017; and -- though I didn't notice at the time -- the famous vampire story is dedicated to "my dear friend, Hommy Beg", who turns out to be none other than Hall Caine, author of -- inter alia -- The Manxman. I love these little literary connections. It's ironic, of course, that in those days it was Caine who was the BIG literary name, and Stoker very much the also-ran. Now hardly anyone has heard of Caine, and Stoker is everywhere...



***

I really enjoyed Shadowplay. Of course it's wildly OTT. Melodramatic, campy, full of rhetorical flourish. How could it not be? It's about the theatre, and it IS theatre. So, we have ghosts and fires and tremendous tantrums (with a veritable lexicon of curses) and dramatic tumbles, plus the backdrop of London at the time of the Ripper and the Oscar Wilde trial.

But it's also a beautiful and seemingly very sympathetic portrayal of Stoker, who never seems entirely comfortable in his own skin. For the first seven years of his life, he was pretty much confined to bed, the victim of some unidentified illness. He recovered, and grew up sporty, sociable, and curious. But -- as O'Connor tells it anyway -- some of the stuffing seemed to have been incurably knocked out of him. He falls under the spell of Henry Irving, and devotes himself wholeheartedly to the Lyceum Theatre in London, where he was manager from 1878 to 1904. Irving is impossible to work for, and these days would face harassment charges for sure. And yet Stoker stays loyal and devoted. Sacrificed on the way, however, are his marriage and much of his writing ambition. It's heart-rending to hear of his lack of self-belief. If only he could have known...


Irving, by William Nicholson


And by Frank Eugene

We also spare a thought for Stoker's wife, meanwhile. Florence, once wooed by Oscar Wilde, has a very practical turn of mind, and she it is who insists that Stoker establish copyright to Dracula (which could be done by having it performed as a play, interestingly enough). By the end, after her husband's death, she's sounding understanding and tolerant. But it can't have been easy...

Entering and leaving the story like a kind fairy is the glorious Ellen Terry. She's the only one who has any rick over Irving, and Stoker is more than a little in love with her. There's a camaraderie among the three of them at some points -- but the physical relationship between Irving and Terry again sidelines Stoker.


Ellen Terry at 16, by Julia Margaret Cameron. This is such a strikingly contemporary-looking photo that I had to double-check it was genuine. It was probably taken just after Terry married George Frederick Watts, a painter who was thirty years her senior. They honeymooned on the Isle of Wight in the village where Cameron lived


Photographer unknown. And this, by the way, is an extraordinarily rich collection of photos depicting Irving and Terry playing Shakespeare

Was Stoker also in love with Irving -- as opposed to just in thrall to him? Sexuality is handled very discreetly. We are mostly left to wonder about Stoker's late-night London walks, but he's often a frightened man, and at one point he has a very frank conversation with scene-painter/assistant Harks (when we first meet her she's posing as a man, called -- yes -- Jonathan Harker, but later, she's clearly a discreetly lesbian woman). This is when he comes as close as he ever does to revealing a same-sex attraction. As always, you think: How indescribably cruel that people had to go through life hiding all this.

But with Irving, it's all much more complicated. The first substantive scene in the book gives us "two gentlemen of the theatre" -- Irving and Stoker -- travelling by train from London to Bradford. It's 12 October 1905. This is the day before Irving dies, but of course we don't know that yet. O'Connor tells us: "There is between them that peculiar freemasonry of the elderly couple who have long sailed the strange latitudes and craggy archipelagos of monogamy, known much, seen much, forgiven almost everything, long ago said whatever needed to be said, which was never that much in the first place..." We then go back to the late 1870s, when Stoker and Irving first met, and begin to fill in the intervening stormy relationship.

The epigraph comes from Edward Gordon Craig, Ellen Terry's son: "In every being who lives, there is a second self very little known to anyone. You who read this have a real person hidden under your better-known personality, and hardly anyone knows it -- it's the best part of you, the most interesting, the most curious, the most heroic, and it explains that part of you that puzzles us. It is your secret self." There are plenty of secret selves in evidence in Shadowplay...

And in old age, I guess we get even better at hiding the selves we don't want to show to others. I wondered about the long coda that succeeds Irving's death. But ultimately, it worked. True, it's full of pathos, and tugs at our heart-strings: Stoker, poor and sick, weaving lies to keep up his image; Terry, struggling to remember names; the auction of Henry Irving's possessions... But it acts as a powerful counterfoil to all the drama and passion of the previous sections.


Pickford's House Museum, Derby, 2024

***

What's really clever about the book is the way it foreshadows the creation of Dracula. Shadowplay's conceit is that it's an unpublished novel -- made up of diary pages and private notes (some in shorthand), now first-person, now third-person -- which Stoker is handing on to Ellen Terry to help her write her memoir. Dracula itself, of course, is a collection of such snippets. And it, too, opens on a train. Here's the pseudo-Gothic first paragraph with which O'Connor begins the story proper: "Out of the gathering swirls of mist roars the hot black monster, screeching and belching its acrid bilious smoke, a fetor of cordite stench. Thunder and cinders, coalman and boilerman, black cast iron and white-hot friction, rattling on the roadway of steel and olden oak as dewdrops sizzle on the flanks. Foxes slink to lairs. Fawns flit and flee..."

And, detail by detail, we see the elements of Dracula emerge in Stoker's consciousness. The magistrate who dies before pronouncing the death sentence: "Blood had gushed from him in torrents, drenching the floor of his chamber..."; the constable with the "small white incisors", holding a stake...

Some critics mock what I thought was a great detail: The Lyceum's ghost is called Mina, and Stoker is strangely oblivious to her presence. She longs and battles to be noticed and remembered. And of course, in Dracula, Jonathan Harker's wife is Mina... How many of our decisions are influenced by ghosts we have no consciousness of encountering...?


Bram Stoker

Was Irving actually the inspiration for Dracula? The actor certainly had a mesmerising, irresistible quality. "I don't bite," O'Connor has him telling Stoker; in another scene, we have the famous thespian "peeling a pomegranate with a dagger, feeding handfuls of its bloody beads to his dog".

But O'Connor is playing with us. As Anthony Cummins puts it: "Shadowplay makes fiction out of a longstanding critical interpretation of Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, often read as a vessel for the mixed-up emotions spilling over from his day job as manager of a London theatre... It’s testament to the novel’s levity that the central idea of Stoker turning Irving into a vampiric aristocrat comes to stand not only for the author’s private working out of his own hidden desires but also as a kind of perverse and ultimately loving revenge on a difficult boss."

Shona Parker comments: "There is various speculation amongst Stoker’s biographers, but all seem to agree that Dracula pulled together his many influences from childhood, the theatre, Henry Irving himself and Stoker’s many interests in the gothic, the melodramatic, philosophy and life after death."

At the end of the day, there's nothing quite so Gothic as a theatre... The Lyceum is wonderfully tatty, under all the glitz. The rodents, the unwashed costumes, the spiders, the discarded props, the under-roof eyrie that Stoker comes to occupy -- it would be food for the dullest imagination, and Stoker's was anything but that.

***

One final concluding rabbit-hole:

Did Stoker use the crimes of Jack the Ripper as a template for Dracula? O'Connor has him musing on these crimes more than once -- weirded out, as we might all be, by the thought that the perpetrator was never identified, and could be someone he actually knew...

Robert Eighteen-Bisang points out that Stoker's social circle included many of those who have come under suspicion (including a friend of Hall Caine's); and he corresponded with one of the investigating detectives. "It is possible that Bram Stoker began to compose a vampire novel and, at some point, hit upon the idea of using the murders in Whitechapel as a guideline, but he may have started to write a novel about the murders which became a vampire novel..." Ultimately, though, Dracula is not Jack the Ripper.

There have also been claims that Stoker did actually know the identity of the Ripper, and encoded it within the text of Dracula. For more on this, and a repudiation, see here.



***

Full marks from me, then, for this entertaining and thought-provoking study of Stoker, described by Ellen Terry, in The Story of My Life, as "one of the most kind and tender-hearted of men".

It's an elegiac work, for sure. Sadie Jones: "All the wildness, wit and passion don’t come without a price in Shadowplay, any more than in life. As the Victorian era shifts into the new century, what has been gothic and thrilling becomes grotesque in the light of modernity. Never has that reputedly gilded era seemed so pale or flat. As much as this is a hugely entertaining book about the grand scope of friendship and love, it is also, movingly -- at times, agonisingly -- a story of transience, loss and true loyalty. Fittingly for a novel that flirts with Dracula, Shadowplay also dances with death. 'Where did it go?' asks Ellen. 'That mad, blazing time when we swirled the stars in the sky.'"

She might well ask...

In a beautiful coincidence, Claire Laporte made me aware of Dracula Daily just as I was finishing this. Because Dracula is written in the form of diary entries and letters, with dates, you can read it "on the day", as it were, and Dracula Daily sends you by email the date-appropriate bits. It's a great idea, and I'm really enjoying revisiting Stoker's classic in this slightly different way.

We started on 3 May, so we're only a few days in. There's definitely still time to sign up, especially as it's free!