Henry Irving is dying as Becket, downstage, Bradford Theatre Royal, and the house is doing the thing houses do at that line, which is stop breathing. Curtain. Calls. Then a cab to the Midland Hotel, and he goes down in the lobby and dies there, hours after the performance. That was 1905, and he was sixty-seven.
Cut back to the Lyceum, any night of the twenty-odd years before. Actor-manager meant he owned the evening end to end: he ran his own lighting rehearsals, worked out where the gas and the limes went and what they did to a face, kept an orchestra on the payroll, chose the plays, paid for the scenery. His business manager — contracts, tours, the endless letters — was Bram Stoker, who had his own writing going on the side. Irving had spent years arguing that acting sat level with music and painting, and in 1895 he was knighted, the first actor, which is one way of having the argument conceded.
Stoker kept those Lyceum books for twenty-seven years, Constance, and wrote Dracula in the evenings around them — the novel's all letters and ledgers and timetables, which is about what you'd expect from a man who spent his days on contracts and tours. I've two copies; one was loved very hard indeed.
He also killed the lights out in the house, which nobody did before him properly — before that you sat in a half-lit room looking at your neighbours as much as the stage. Darken the auditorium and the only painted thing with light on it is the actor's face. Cheapest bit of staging he ever bought, Constance.