One would think that an event designed to celebrate an Irish author who created one of the greatest horror characters of all time, a blood-sucking count from Transylvania named Dracula in a novel of the same name, would be steeped in blood, gore and doom. Yet even with Halloween clearly looming over Dublin, there wasn't a fang in sight last weekend during the Bram Stoker Festival.
Instead, the four-day event paid homage to the spirit of bizarre Gothic imagination behind the celebrated 1897 novel by offering “four days of living stories and four nights of deadly adventures”, all while promoting the festivities with the light-hearted hash tag #bitemeDublin.
At Marsh’s Library, the Enlightenment-era facility in St Patrick’s Close, by St Patrick’s Cathedral, the Hushed event involved a series of candlelit walks, set to the sounds of Dublin’s Tonnta vocal ensemble. Visitors explored the nooks and crannies of a building where the Clontarf-born Stoker spent nights researching the legends and mythology that informed his work.
Total Nightmare, an evening at the stately Freemasons’ Hall on Great Strand Street, had notable Dubliners recalling a variety of scary events in their personal lives. Theatre producer Matthew Smyth remembered being arrested for a crime he didn’t commit in Croatia. Another woman spoke about various romantic tragedies, never mentioning her wheelchair, while Matthew Jebb, director of the National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin, delighted in describing some of the outrageously evil tendencies of some of nature’s most violent plants.
A few kilometres away at the Generator Hostel, Sean Gilmore was helping friend Rebecca Germaine, both 22, man her family’s The Birds and the Teas chutney booth at the Gothic Edition Smithfield Market Fair, their faces in scary Halloween make-up. “We did it ourselves,” said Germaine. Outside Smithfield Square, people waited in a long queue to see the temporary light installation by the Dublin artist Maser, which was commissioned and produced specifically for the festival.
“Why are we doing this?” one of the girls asked, shivering into the collar of her coat. “Culture,” her friend answered simply. Maser’s intention for the Stoker piece – for visitors to consider what lurks behind the shiny facade of progress – was executed via flashing strobe lights, a screeching soundtrack and floor-to-ceiling neon pink light beams. “Weird,” someone commented over the din.
Considering that Stoker is so frequently overshadowed by Dracula, to the point that a half-dozen biographies all but ignore him on their cover, having the festival devoted to the writer and not his most famous creation is a fitting tribute.
The book, a series of letters, diary entries and ship logs, has of course spawned an enduring legacy of theatre productions, films, museums and more recently, video games, apps, and American television shows including True Blood as well as the Twilight book and movie franchise.
Yet for creating something so strange and macabre Stoker, who many people might not even know as Irish, seemed a completely normal man. Certainly his personal life pales in comparison to many of his country’s other celebrated literary figures, who were motivated by a mix of pain, political fervour, love or addiction.
There's the Nobel Prize for literature-winning George Bernard Shaw, an activist and prolific playwright who wrote the popular refinement romance Pygmalian; Oscar Wilde, a buoyant and eminently quotable author of the 1895 masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest, who died in tragic exile; or the wild entertainer, novelist and playwright Brendan Behan, who was jailed for Irish Republican Army activity and later succumbed to alcoholism in 1964 at just 41.
Instead Stoker was a former civil servant-turned theatre manager, who married with one son, spent seven painstaking years researching Dracula and was by most accounts trustworthy, hardworking and loyal before dying after a series of strokes at the age of 64 in 1912.
And while there are many theories as to what sparked him to plumb such dark depths – that he was the victim of child abuse; childhood illnesses led him to rethink the needle’s jab as a vampire’s bite, even that he was so jealous of his younger brother George that he harboured fantasies of killing and eating him – Jarlath Killeen isn’t buying them.
The enthusiastic Trinity College English professor and editor of 2012's Bram Stoker: Centenary Essays charmed an eager crowd of residents and tourists during a "Who Was Bram Stoker?" festival talk at the National Gallery of Ireland. Despite the violent and vengeful work he produced, Kileen doesn't believe Stoker had very much of a dark side at all.
“He was an ordinary man who by a kind of hard-working fluke produced an extraordinary novel,” he said. “That is all.”
For more on visiting Dublin, go to www.tourismireland.com
amcqueen@thenational.ae
