By Danielle Mages Amato

Although he is remembered today primarily as a novelist and the author of Dracula, Bram Stoker spent most of his professional life engaged in an entirely different career. For 27 years, he worked as the business manager of the Royal Lyceum Theatre in London, in close partnership with famous actor Henry Irving. Stoker’s love of the stage shines through his fiction, shaping the way he wrote Dracula and much of his other work. Not only that, the stage has indelibly shaped the character of Dracula himself, transforming him across the decades from the brooding villain of Stoker’s original novel to the pop-culture juggernaut who swaggers his way through Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen’s irreverent Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors.

Stoker’s fascination with the stage started even prior to his years running the Lyceum. A decade before he accepted Henry Irving’s offer to run one of London’s most prestigious theatres, Stoker first saw Irving perform in Dublin, captivating audiences in the role of Captain Absolute in Richard B. Sheridan’s The Rivals. By all reports, that was the moment Stoker fell madly in love with the stage. A student at Trinity College, Stoker tried out acting for himself, pursuing and eventually playing the very role he first saw Irving perform. But acting wasn’t to be Stoker’s path. Soon after, Stoker started writing theatre reviews for the Dublin Evening Mail (in addition to penning some short stories on the side). Stoker also attended literary salons at the home of Sir William and Lady Jane Wilde, an influential couple in the cultural and artistic life of Dublin, who also happened to be the parents of Oscar Wilde, one of the greatest playwrights of the era. 

Wilde and Bram Stoker became fast friends—and occasional rivals. When Wilde left Dublin to attend Oxford, he left behind a charming and vivacious young woman whom he had been (perhaps for appearances) courting: Florence Balcombe. After Wilde was out of the picture, Stoker stepped in and, in short order, married her. For Stoker, Balcombe would become not only his wife of 37 years, but also a great collaborator and the literary executor of his estate for decades after his death. 

As manager of the Lyceum, Stoker oversaw hundreds of productions performed by Henry Irving, and the two spent countless hours talking through plays, stagings, and interpretations. The two were connoisseurs of the latest in theatrical technology, championing new stage effects and bringing complicated illusions to the Lyceum in order to mount the Gothic, melodramatic work popular during the period. Vampires were not uncommon characters at the Lyceum; the theatre even had what it called a “vampire trap”—a special trap door originally constructed for a production of J.R. Planche’s play The Vampire.

But one play consumed Stoker and Irving in particular: Macbeth. In his Personal Reminiscences, Stoker wrote, “It was a favourite subject to talk between us, and one evening in February 1887, [we] talked over the play till the windows began to show their edges brightening in the coming day.” Just a few years after Irving’s landmark production of the play in 1888, Stoker began writing Dracula. Connections between the two are many: Lucy’s sleepwalking in the novel mirrors Lady Macbeth’s; the three vampires in Dracula are described as “weird sisters”; both works have a thematic obsession with sleep and sleeplessness. And Dracula, like Stoker’s other fiction, shows the lingering influence of the Victorian theatre, which so often relied on blood effects, fog-choked atmospheres, and supernatural vanishings. 

When Dracula was first published, Stoker staged a reading at the Lyceum of his own hastily written theatrical adaptation of the novel, a common practice to establish copyright of material for the stage. Henry Irving reportedly saw at least a portion of this reading and declared it “dreadful!” Perhaps this proclamation is why Dracula never appeared onstage again until after Stoker’s death. The powerful influence of Stoker’s relationship with Irving, a man he idolized and to whom he gave his entire professional life, led to the suppression on the stage of Stoker’s masterwork during his lifetime. But perhaps ironically, it was those very stage adaptations that would remake and reimagine the character of Dracula into the iconic figure we know and recognize today. 

Bela Lugosi (center) as Count Dracula at the Fulton Theater with Edward Van Sloan, Terence Neill, Bela Lugosi, Herbert Bunston, and Bernard Jukes, 1927–1928.

In 1923, actor Hamilton Deane created the first produced stage version of Dracula. Unlike the productions popular during Stoker’s time at the Lyceum—with their large casts, misty outdoor sets, and reliance on high spectacle—the theatre productions of the 1920s tended more toward drawing-room dramas, unfolding in well-upholstered, high-society interiors. And so Dracula transformed as well. The character whom Stoker described as “a tall old man” with massive eyebrows, bushy hair, “rank” breath, and hairy palms became instead an urbane figure in white tie and tails who wore an opera cape and mingled with the best of London society. (Contrast the version of Dracula in the 1922 silent German film Nosferatu, who hews closer to Stoker’s description.)

Publicity photo for Dracula’s Broadway run.

Deane’s play was a tremendous hit. By 1927, Dracula opened on Broadway (in a revised and Americanized version) with Bela Lugosi in the title role. By the time Lugosi made the jump to screen in Tod Browning’s 1931 film, his Dracula was cemented in the cultural imagination: a character popularized by film, but ultimately shaped by and for the theatre. 

Want to read more?

Bruce Scivally’s Dracula FAQ: All That’s Left to Know about the Count from Transylvania.

David J. Skal’s Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula. 

Catherine Wynne’s Bram Stoker, Dracula, and the Victorian Gothic Stage.