Henry Irving stopped mid scene and stared down at them grimly, his eyes glowing red in the gaslight. 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. 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”. 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.
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.
T he 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.
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