Shadow Play by Joseph O'Connor

Shadowplay is a wonderful, lyrical novel set around the life of Bram Stoker and his time as manager of London's Lyceum Theatre in late Victorian London. The two stars of the Lyceum were its owner Henry Irving, a vain, demanding martinet and Ellen Terry, witty, seductive and very much in control of her own destiny.



The story is a marvellous imagining of this three-sided relationship and switches between first and third person, letters and dialogue to weave a compelling narrative. Anyone who has  enjoyed O'Connor's Star of The Sea will find more riches to feast on here. You lose yourself in the London where Oscar Wilde is on trial by day and Jack the Ripper walks the East End by night.

Ellen Terry, on Hery Irving:

"Make no mistake he was a peerless actor. The greatest I'll ever see. Majestic, powerful, like an animal not a man. You couldn't look away not even for a second. It was as though your neck was in a vice and your eyes on the stage....

Trouble is he adored the applause and that gets in the way. There's a certain sort of actor, a clap-hound I call them, who do anything for the applause, set himself on fire if he needs to. Harry was King of the clap-hounds. He did it too often. It was like watching the world's greatest concert pianist juggling coconuts in a booth on Southend Pier. Fine, so far as it goes. But there's a Steinway behind you darling. Give us a ruddy tune while you're up there."

But what of Dracula? This one book, famous the world over, is why we know the name Bram Stoker -who knew he was a theatre manager? Throughout Shadowplay, we see Bram, a struggling author, forever twarted by his day job. He sneaks away to an attic, haunted by the ghost of  a dead servant girl, to write stories and a novel but nothing sells; yet slowly a new story is developing in his head. As Shadowplay unfolds, hints of Dracula begin to emerge - a stage painter called Jonathan Harker, a box of earth, the blood and horror of the Ripper, a lunatic assylum where an inmate eats flies, a visit to Whitby. Behind the genesis of Dracula is the shadow world of the theatre, a place of drama, emotion and other worlds, where actors lose their identity and Shylock, Hamlet and Ophelia never die.

Article about Bram Stoker by Joseph O'Connor 

Much better review of Shadowplay in The Times