The TLS blog

Stoker, the stage and the London Library

 

By MICHAEL CAINES

"To be reviewed in a future issue of the TLS." That's what I promised on this blog back in November, at the end of a piece about Bram Stoker, Wilkie Collins and the theatre. Now Tracy C. Davis's fascinating piece on the book I was talking about, Bram Stoker and the Stage, is not only in the paper but on the TLS website, as Bram Stoker before Dracula. It's quite a story.

Bram Stoker at the theatre (with Wilkie Collins)

By MICHAEL CAINES

As has been mentioned in the TLS from time to time, Bram Stoker, the man now known as the author of Dracula, would have been known in the nineteenth century as the business manager of Henry Irving's theatre, the Lyceum, in London. That makes them partners in the production of melodrama: while Irving stalked the stage, dying, guilt-stricken, in The Bells or some similar piece, night after night, Stoker handled the correspondence. Phil Baker, reviewing a biography of Stoker a while ago, mentions that he wrote around half a million letters on Irving's behalf.

Usually, once noticed, that Irving-Stoker-Dracula connection starts to take on some historical-critical-biographical significance. Was the great actor a source of inspiration for his confidant's infamous creation? Was it merely a private joke that Jonathan Harker was to attend a performance of Vanderdecken – a stage version of the Flying Dutchman legend in which Irving played the lead and which Stoker himself partly rewrote in 1878?

A social media view of Much Ado

By MICHAEL CAINES

The RSC's "Indian" Much Ado About Nothing officially begins its London run tonight; and this is what Act 2 Scene 3 will look like from the stalls, courtesy of what is apparently something of a novelty at the moment: a theatre company holding a social media call.

An Ira Aldridge mystery

By MICHAEL CAINES

A couple of months ago, Douglas Field reviewed a new two-volume biography of the celebrated nineteenth-century actor Ira Aldridge, the "African Roscius", the "first black actor of note". We know that he played Othello (predictably) and was eventually to add a "Jim Crow song-and-dance routine to his act", once he got to touring the English provinces during the 1830s (he was American by birth but was by then claiming to be a "scion of Senegalese royalty").

But what about his other roles – and in particular the role depicted in this painting, recently discovered in a garage in Birmingham?

John Arden and the humbling of the critics

By Michael Caines

In belated tribute to the playwright John Arden, who died last month, here's another word from the TLS archives (located in the vicinity of the basement labyrinth, obviously), from a review of a collection of three plays by the theatre critic Irving Wardle:

"The case of John Arden is one to make theatre critics realize the humble nature of their occupation. . . .

The other Belle's Stratagem

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By Michael Caines

The story goes – if I haven't muddled my theatrical anecdotes of the eighteenth century – that when Goldsmith decided he would call his new play She Stoops To Conquer, his friend Sir Joshua Reynolds suggested an alternative . . . .

Georgiana the witch (and other eighteenth-century actresses)

Here's how visitors to the National Portrait Gallery can see the witches from Macbeth this autumn: as portrayed in chalk and gouache by Daniel Gardner in 1775, and "played" by a trio of friends, the Duchess of Devonshire (or just "Georgiana" to readers of Amanda Foreman's biography), Viscountess Melbourne and the sculptor Anne Seymour Damer.

The online catalogue notes that there may be political allegory lurking here – although it's tempting to think that the claim that if there's no direct parallel for the work's "composition" elsewhere in Gardner's oeuvre, there is at least a male counterpart – three political animals caught in the middle of their plotting – by Gardner elsewhere in the NPG itself. All they need is a cauldron.

"Georgiana the witch" is one of two significant novelties in an exhibition that's just opened at the NPG, The First Actresses . . .

Improving Hannah Cowley

Photo: Jane Hobson.

2011, in London at least, has turned out to be a good year for – of all things – eighteenth-century drama.

Mind you, it only takes three productions to make it a good year for eighteenth-century drama: The Beggar’s Opera at the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park, The Rivals at the Barbican and now, in a more courageous move, The Belle’s Stratagem by Hannah Cowley at the Southwark Playhouse (smartly tucked away under a railway near London Bridge).