![]() “Eyes glowing red in the gaslight,” Irving terrifies the audience, “slinking towards the lip of the stage, left hand on hip, wiping his wet mouth with the back of his sleeve. “Shadowplay” opens in Dublin in the winter of 1876, with O’Connor painting that ravishing city with a soft lyricism that Stoker himself might have envied: “Smacks heading down the estuary, trailing petticoats of nets, out towards the expanse of the sea.” Stoker, a government clerk who moonlights as a theater critic, is reeling from the visceral intensity of Irving’s performance in Dublin as Hamlet. Joseph O’Connor explores the likely source of Irving’s fury - his temper was notorious - in his novel “Shadowplay,” a vibrantly imaginative narrative of passion, intrigue and literary ambition set in the garish heyday of a theater presided over by a tyrannical Irving and an exquisitely vulgar Ellen Terry, Britain’s answer to Sarah Bernhardt. The author, Bram Stoker, was the devoted and long-suffering business assistant to the Lyceum’s capricious actor-manager, Sir Henry Irving, who angrily refused to read the part of the saber-toothed count. ![]() In 1897, a handful of spectators at the Lyceum Theater in London witnessed the improbable birth of “Dracula,” which was presented as a one-off stage reading before the novel was published some days later.
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