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. 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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