#shakespearean / stage manager reading dracula

[missewoodhouse]

“New Women” and Stoker’s Theatre Job

Given Bram’s “New Woman” rant at the end of Mina’s 10 August diary entry, now seems like a good time to discuss two of the great actresses of the Fin de Siècle stage! First of all, we have Ellen Terry -- onstage partner to (you guessed it) our pal Henry Irving, and probably most widely recognizable in this John Singer Sargent painting of her as Lady Macbeth.

While the beetle-wing green dress deserved to be immortalized in all its stately glory, the tone of the portrait is actually very different from that of Terry’s Lady M -- she never crowned herself onstage, and the character was played with a much more “fragile” brand of late-Victorian femininity.  Despite a scandalous private life (including two children born out of wedlock, gasp!) Terry’s public persona was aligned with a series of “virtuous” Shakespeare heroines (Ophelia, Cordelia, Desdemona, Portia, Beatrice, Imogen).

In 1878, when Henry Irving became manager of the Lyceum theatre (where Bram Stoker soon became business manager), he convinced Ellen Terry to join the company as his leading lady.  Both actors were separated from their spouses (Terry from her second husband) at this point, so their partnership publicly mirrored that of earlier husband-wife leading pairs.  At least officially, Irving dictated the company’s artistic choices, the casting, and Terry’s (record breaking) salary, and onstage, Lady M may have been evil, but she was also Macbeth’s perfectly loyal wife.

Ellen Terry’s Imogen (see the colorized edit of a publicity photograph above), opposite Henry Irving’s villainous Iachimo in 1896 is regarded by some as a key inspiration for Lucy Westenra (interesting article/abstract here and book chapter/summary here, apologies for the paywalls).  Given that Iachimo creeps on Imogen while she’s asleep and then uses this encounter to threaten her life / accuse her of promiscuity, there are certainly some parallels to be had if you go looking for them.

Interestingly enough, however, when Stoker produced a staged reading of Dracula at the Lyceum in 1897 (in order to claim copyright over any future stage adaptation), Ellen Terry’s daughter, Edith Craig, played Mina.  And Edith was very definitely a card-carrying, suffrage-supporting, queer and polyamorous New Woman. Fun fact: in the post-Lyceum phase of her career, Ellen Terry was actually a pretty active suffrage campaigner / fundraiser too. (And I suspect, if we were to carry Mina and Lucy forward to their hypothetical Dracula-free, untouched by Bram Stoker’s authorial misogyny futures, both of our heroines eventually would be too).

While we’re on the subject of the scandalous New Woman, however, the other late Victorian actress I cannot go without mentioning is the French sensation Sarah Bernhardt (who by the time Dracula was published had a substantial performance history in England and the US as well).  A rough contemporary of Ellen Terry, Bernhardt, by contrast, cultivated her own reputation for the scandalous.  Bernhardt quite intentionally broke gendered boundaries left right and center.

Visually, Bernhardt is perhaps most strongly associated with the art nouveau posters she commissioned (from artist Alphonse Mucha) for her theatre company in Paris - examples of 1899′s Hamlet and La Tosca are above.  While there are also plenty of photographs of her as Hamlet (although far from the first woman to play the role, Bernhardt’s performance is one of the most famous) and in other promotional images, the photo I’d rather draw your attention to is this one:

Yes, that is a young Sarah Bernhardt lying asleep in a coffin -- a coffin which she is said to have traveled with and claimed to sleep in regularly.  Quite the publicity stunt (and pre-Dracula too)!  Other features of her eccentric public persona included traveling with a menagerie of wild animals -- including an alligator, at least one variety of big cat, and a number of lizards and/or chameleons.

Bernhardt was also a sculptor, and her Self-Portrait as a Chimera (circa 1880, below) notably features bat-like wings, instead of more traditionally feathered, bird-like ones.

Which is to say, I think we’ve found another vampire!

#ellen terry #sarah bernhardt #Bram Stoker #our good friend henry irving #fin de siècle #the new woman (gasp!) #dracula daily #theatre history #shakespearean / stage manager reading dracula #cymbeline #hamlet #lady macbeth

[missewoodhouse]

I had not re-read Dracula since finding out that Bram Stoker was British actor-manager Henry Irving’s business manager (maybe more what we’d call production manager today) so I signed up for Dracula daily. And from the May 5th entries I am particularly enjoying:

A) How much you can tell that the author is into theatrical lighting design (and specifically theatrical lighting design at a time when the transition from gas lamps / limelight to electric light was allowing for the development of some really cool new optical illusion tricks - and also less burning down the entire theatre).

B) That the physical description of Dracula is really just Henry Irving (see below) with a mustache and some fangs. Like, dude, you are describing your boss. Your boss who is a super famous actor.

#dracula daily #bram stoker #just casually writing horror fiction about my boss #who is henry irving #19th century theatre technology #shakespearean / stage manager reading dracula

[missewoodhouse]

I know last year there was some fun about Bram’s bastardization of “My tables, my tables; meet it is I set it down” (Hamlet, Folio text) in the May 16th entry, but Jonathan is giving off peak Hamlet energy throughout it. We’ve got:

“If I be sane, then surely it is maddening” circumstances

Temptations of the flesh

Not being able to tell if these are ghosts, devils, or something else entirely

Whatever they are, those things disappear suddenly (and in Bram’s 19th century theatre-person brain, they are probably staged with Pepper’s Ghost)

#dracula daily #May 16th #shakespearean / stage manager reading dracula #hamlet

[missewoodhouse]

Also, I know I’m a few days late on this…but assuming that Dracula did not succumb to a sudden and overwhelming urge to binge-drink his way through the Demeter’s crew like a family sized package of vampiric Capri Suns — I’d like to propose the working counter-theory that Count “I’ll just pretend to be all of the servants” Dracula is very much an I’d-rather-just-do-this-whole-group-project-myself kind of guy. By which I mean that Dracula got a bit fed up with the speed of travel and/or monotony of being a passenger and decided it would be easier to just take the crew out of the equation and take over all of the sailing himself. (He’s totally read a how-to book on it at some point - or at least some British sea captain’s memoir, and that’s probably close enough.) Only Dracula wasn’t accounting for (a-counting for?) the captain’s eleventh-hour crucifix on the steering wheel plan. He was totally planning on navigating sans crew (he’s got some level of control over the weather, after all) — he was clearly not expecting to navigate sans wheel.

#dracula daily #log of the demeter #count dracula’s poor planning #shakespearean / stage manager reading dracula #can you tell that I was also an i’d-rather-just-do-the-group-project-myself kind of a child?

[missewoodhouse]

Back on my Bram-Stoker-worked-in-theatre train: Every time one of these vampires doesn’t cast a shadow or walks through a wall or fails to block Jonathan Harker’s view of an otherworldly blue flame, all I can think of is Pepper’s Ghost (aka the hottest new stage illusion of the 1860s). Was this trick for projecting an actor’s image onto the stage while avoiding the physics involved in their corporeal presence a bit passé by the 1890s? Yes, it was. But Stoker absolutely would have been familiar with it, and I think it shows.

Image credit: Die Physik in Bildern Eßlingen (1881), Rakow Research Library, as reproduced in Image from Eyes, Lies and Illusions: the Art of Deception (2004) and cited by the Corning Museum of Glass, https://blog.cmog.org/2012/09/11/ghosts-and-magicand-glass/.

#dracula daily #bram stoker #19th century theatre technology #pepper’s ghost #shakespearean / stage manager reading dracula

[missewoodhouse]

Yet more evidence that Mina “Train Fiend” Harker is clearly the stage-manager-friend in our favorite group of vampire hunters.

In my head, Bram’s own (presumably comprehensive) knowledge of the train schedules is only partly due to his own commute.  Bram was a theatre manager, and I too have often memorized the local train schedules because actors take the fucking train. (Expletive required because when rehearsal schedules are involved public transit is always late -- So you build in train delay time, but not too much of it or they’ll try to take the next train and be late anyway.)

#dracula daily #mina train fiend harker #bram stoker #shakespearean / stage manager reading dracula #i love actors and public transit #but i don't think I've ever gone a show without cursing actor train delays #and planning the schedule around convenient train times is always good for morale! #october 28th

[missewoodhouse]

For the Dracula Daily crowd: Lee Scoresby is the Quincey P. Morris of His Dark Materials.  Discuss.

#random Texans in an English novel #this feels like one of those I'd have two nickels things #dracula daily #golden compass #subtle knife #the real question is who that would make Hester then #shakespearean / stage manager reading dracula

[missewoodhouse]

If there are any Dracula Daily fans in the Washington, DC area, I just saw that Kate Hamill’s Dracula adaptation (Dracula: A Feminist Revenge Fantasy, Really) has a production running in DC through next weekend (Nov. 6, 2022).

I haven’t seen the show (alas, I’m currently across the Atlantic) but I’m a huge fan of Hamill’s adaptations in general!

Fun Fact -- This is the play (although not the production) responsible for the BEST NY Times correction ever: “Also, the author of Dracula was incorrect.  He is Bram Stoker, not Jane Austen”.  (Hamill has also written a number of Austen adaptations, and the reporter was trying to list a whole bunch of her plays.)

(Credit for the screenshot of the NY Times correction - Jan. 24, 2020 - goes to https://at.tumblr.com/amarguerite/kendallroy-i-just-want-to-know-how-you-got/nr44rijrbwdv)

#dracula daily #theatre #kate hamill #shakespearean / stage manager reading dracula

[missewoodhouse]

I’ve got to say, the whole “let’s just send the new guy to appease the strange whims of the wealthy Hungarian count in the mountains” thing we’ve got going on in Dracula here gives off really similar energy to the “oh, we just pay the murderer in the theatre’s basement a monthly retainer not to murder us” thing in Phantom of the Opera.

Is this solution OSHA approved? No. But will it get the problem off my desk in the short term? Probably.

And Jonathan ‘there-are-lots-of-red-flags-here-but-I-guess-that’s-all-just-part-of-being-a-newly-minted-solicitor’ ‘I-enthusiastically-scoped-out-a-definitely-haunted-mansion-for-the-real-estate-client’ Harker would absolutely cut a check to the Phantom if his boss told him that’s the way that things are done.

#safety third! #if you couldn’t already tell that Stoker was a theatre person #if you can’t throw money at the problem just throw your underlings as cannon fodder #or maybe that should be the other way around? #dracula daily #shakespearean / stage manager reading dracula

[missewoodhouse]

Happy International Stage Management Day

...from your friendly, Dracula-reading, probably-not-a-vampire Stage Manager!

https://q2qcomics.com/comic/q2q402/

Maybe half-vampire?  Because let’s face it, Mina-type-and-organize-all-the-diaries-in-duplicate-Harker is definitely the Stage Manager of the Dracula-hunting crew.

#Stage Management #q2q comics #dracula daily #shakespearean / stage manager reading dracula

[missewoodhouse]

Re: the Henry-Irving-as-model-for-Dracula thing, when Dracula says “by our talking I may learn the English intonation; and I would that you tell me when I make error, even of the smallest, in my speaking”, I will now, always and forever, assume that Dracula is aiming to sound like this recording of a late-career Irving doing the opening to Richard III (in a very BBC voice). And probably imagine him practicing “O for a muse of fire” over and over again, as in every beginner voice verse class I have ever participated in or observed.

#dracula daily #jonathan harker's travel diary #may 7th #shakespearean / stage manager reading dracula