Ghost Light - Joseph O'Connor

 I enjoyed Shadowplay, O'Connor's novel about Bram Stoker and Henry Irving, but Ghost Lights is even better.  It"s an evocation of the affair between the dying genius of the Irish National Theatre, J M Synge, and his street urchin muse Molly Allgood, who starred, under her stage name Maire O'Neill, as Pegeen in his subversive masterwork Playboy of the Western World.

Forty-five years on from Synge's death and Molly is living alone in London, only her cat and the drink for company.  Today, however, in late October 1952, she has a gig - an old admirer has booked her for a BBC radio play, and Molly has the entire day to ensure she gets there on time.  As she walks through autumnal London she polishes her memories of better times, as a teenage actress in Dublin, of Synge and his eccentric courtship.

It is all beautifully done.  The tragedy that strikes at the end is so masterfully handled that I was almost overwhelmed.  Dublin, London and New York are all vibrantly conjured.  I recognised the foyer of Old Broadcasting House; the same for Molly as it was for me a quarter-century later.  It is only more recently that I have come to realise how important the Abbey Players and the Playboy were to the emergence of a radical arts theatre around the world.  I think I read the Playboy for the first time around the time Joseph O'Connor was writing Ghost Light.  What took me so long, I wonder?  Don't know that I would have appreciated it properly had I been any younger.  By God, I get it now - and I loved Ghost Light for reminding me.

Shadowplay - Joseph O'Connor

 

Modern fiction at its very best, Shadowplay is the story of the triumvirate that brought London's Lyceum Theatre its greatest days at the very end of the 19th century - Sir Henry Irving, Ellen Terry and Bram Stoker, their general manager, who knocked off his best-known novel in his spare time.  One theory maintains that Count Dracula was based on Irving, so the vampire theme lies across O'Connor's story.  There are also fun jokes - for example, Jonathan Harker, the young scenic whizz hired by Stoker, turns out to be a cross-dressing young woman, thereafter known as 'Harks'.  Mina is the name given to the theatre ghost and some of the best writing here is about the ephemeral jaunts of the long-dead spirit.  Mina's room is the abandoned space inside the theatre where Stoker does his writing.  This being the 1880s, for the most part, Jack the Ripper is here too.  But at heart it's a three-handed love story; for all their wildly inappropriate behaviour the three principals are all emotionally tied to one another for life.  O'Connor brings their world beautifully alive.  He is a major contemporary writer.  As a token of how good he is, I draw your attention to the end Coda - totally unnecessary, far too long, and yet so achingly written I wouldn't want to lose a single word.