Shadowplay

by Joseph O’Connor

First published 2019

Amazon

4.0(5,594)

London, 1878. Bram Stoker leaves Dublin to manage the Lyceum Theatre for the commanding actor-manager Henry Irving. The work absorbs his time and loyalty, while the company’s celebrated leading actress Ellen Terry becomes central to the emotional life of both men. Their friendships, ambitions and concealed desires develop within a theatrical world built from nightly illusion, exhausting labour and carefully managed public reputations.

As the years pass, Stoker gathers the images and anxieties that will become Dracula, drawing upon late-Victorian London, touring theatre and the private shadows surrounding the Lyceum. O’Connor treats Stoker, Irving and Terry as artists bound together by admiration, dependence and loss rather than as static literary celebrities. The novel connects the creation of Gothic fiction to performance itself: the roles people inhabit, the selves they hide and the ghosts left after applause has ended.