Dracula Week '22

#3 Smoke and Mirrors

Have you ever been backstage at a theatre production? In the performer’s dressing room, and many times in the side wings where they wait to go on stage, are a lot of mirrors.

Dancers have a misguided reputation for being vain because they rely on mirrors as they train. Supposedly, a dancer can’t walk by a large window or even the tiniest mirror without a sideways glance at themselves. Some habits are harder to break than others.

The showstopping musical number from the Broadway musical A Chorus Line is sung by the lead character, Cassie, who is the aging chorus girl trying to make a comeback. “All I ever needed was the music and the mirror and the chance to dance for you.” Yep. That’s an amazingly accurate statement about what being a dancer means. The actress Donna McKechnie put this song and dance number on the eternal map of musical theatre’s most powerful performances because her passion for dancing, initially ballet, had nourished her soul from a very young age.

There’s no shortage of commentary and speculation about why or what Stoker intended by writing Count Dracula as invisible in mirrors. No soul. Not living. Ashamed of what he’d become. Violent at the thought of anyone looking at their reflection saying, “And this is the wretched thing that has done the mischief. It is a foul bauble of man’s vanity. Away with it!” He throws the shaving mirror out the window to shatter on the cobblestones below. As if shards of a mirror are acceptable while the whole is not?

The folklore surrounding mirrors could have influenced Stoker, but as I mentioned, writers gather and weave strands from everywhere for a long time before something appears in a story. Yes, the soul of a person is a major theme in Dracula but recall Stoker’s career as a theatre critic and business manager. Whether or not Stoker ever acted in a play isn’t documented, but once he got an all-access pass to the inner workings of what it means to be an actor, he had to have been awed by a performer’s reliance (and sometimes addiction) to their own reflection. Stoker was and never dropped his role as a critic. Someone who offers feedback to a performer…just like a mirror.

The phrase “smoke and mirrors” has been a theatrical technique since the late 18th century when magicians used it to project an image onto smoke to make the image look as if it were floating, shimmering, or hovering. If that image happened to be a person, they were called spirits and ghosts. Fast forward and the words suggest that what someone is seeing or being told should be investigated vigorously to be sure there is truth there. It’s been a go-to idiom in political commentary since the 20th century. Stoker had to have encountered the practice in 19th-century theatre because it was a very popular stage trick to make the audience believe in something that actually didn’t exist.

See where is leading?

Mirrors (not fun-house distortions) tell the truth. No matter how tiny the shard, the reflection is an exact image with an unbiased, untainted message (wicked Queen in Snow White exempted from this discussion.) This is precisely what you look like and the first impression others will have of you. That truth is the reason performers are trained to use mirrors as a means to improve and as a way to see what needs correcting. Look in the mirror. Pants unzipped. Zip. Go out on stage. The mirror also cuts down on what the critic has to complain about. All the world is a stage.

When Jonathan Harker looked into the mirror to shave then felt Count Dracula’s hand on his shoulder (a common place for the imaginary characters of angel and devil to sit) he cut himself with the razor because the “visitor” surprised him. Snuck up on him. Harker claims to have been able to see the whole room in the reflection, but he didn’t see the physical embodiment of the devil behind him. He only felt his presence in his own physical body.

First lesson in smoke and mirrors: be careful what you project for it has a truth all its own.