Shadowplay by Joseph OConnor review love, greasepaint and the writing of Dracula

The Irish writer Joseph O’Connor is still best known for his 2002 novel, Star of the Sea, but in 2016 he wrote a radio play, Vampyre Man, about the real-life relationship between Bram Stoker and the two greatest stars of Victorian theatre, Henry Irving and Ellen Terry. It is easy to imagine these three magnificent characters refusing to be abandoned on the airwaves, and O’Connor has given them an appropriately grand stage in the breathtaking Shadowplay.

It opens with a letter from Stoker to Terry in 1908, explaining the conceit of the book: “a clutch of diary pages and private notes I kept on and off down the years and had begun working up into a novel ... or perhaps a play”. In the subsequent story within a story, Stoker hops from the first to third person, sometimes describing scenes at which he is not present, and introducing sections in “the voice of Ellen Terry”. As he says to his hero Irving, on their first meeting: “Life without imagination would be an unending hell.” But as Irving replies: “Is it not that anyway?” This is as much a novel about existential struggle as greasepaint – though there is plenty of that, too.

Henry Irving stopped mid scene and stared down at them grimly, his eyes glowing red in the gaslight. Paint dribbling down the contours of his face, like dye splashed on a map, droplets falling on his boots, his doublet and long locks drenched in sweat, his silver painted wooden sword glittering in the gaslight, shimmering with his chainmail in the lightning.

Stoker leaves Dublin for London to run Irving’s theatre, the Lyceum, taking his new wife, Flo, with him. He soon discovers that the actor is a drunk and a narcissist, wild-tempered, generous and vain. It is impossible not to fall in love with him, just as it is impossible not to fall for the divinely charismatic Terry. The friendship between the three, their fallings-out and reunions, are the heart of the book – poor “noble” Flo can’t compete.

The problem with novels about towering historical figures is that most often the author hasn’t the wit or brilliance to capture them, but Shadowplay is a book undaunted. One gives up wondering what is true, because it all is. Huge names come and go: Oscar Wilde has a tragicomic cameo; Jack the Ripper terrorises the London streets; WB Yeats is glimpsed on a Dublin bridge, “a silverback gorilla in a monocle”, his appearance serving only to fire Stoker’s need to escape to London. Stoker seeks himself, and must lose himself to do it. There is much discussion of the self and identity in Shadowplay: good selves, shadow selves, hidden selves, Jekyll and Hyde selves. Sexuality and gender are shapeshifting, and there could be no better place to explore them than O’Connor’s vagabond world of theatre, where his characters may throw off their disguises amid the playacting. “This is how they escape the prison of the self. To see the world through the windows of someone else’s room.”

And all the time, Count Dracula is in the wings, waiting – or we are waiting for him. As Stoker’s immortal work grows in his subconscious, the clues mount up. At their first meeting, Irving says to Stoker, “I don’t bite”; a Jonathan Harker comes to work at the theatre; a ghost named Mina haunts the dilapidated Lyceum at night. There is a book on theatrical effects by an Edward Helsing and a man in a lunatic asylum eats insects in his cell. The pieces of the jigsaw gather, and it is a relief when Stoker at last begins to write.

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.”

Sadie Jones’s The Snakes is published by Chatto. Shadowplay by Joseph O’Connor is published by Vintage (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.

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