Magic - Review

Festival Theatre, Chichester

****

Written by David Haig

Directed by Lucy Bailey

Hadley Fraser hangs out in Magic

Magic is an ingenious new drama from David Haig, an actor and playwright with a talent for spotting an episode of history and then building a fictitious drama that is grounded in a fact-filled foundation. The play explores an imagined series of meeting between Harry Houdini, the acclaimed illusionist and escapologist, and Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle. The author is of course renowned for his creation of the detective Sherlock Holmes, but what is not so well known about Conan-Doyle was his belief in the world of spiritualism and seances.

The essence of Haig’s drama draws on Houdini’s mastery of trickery and ultimate cynicism – he was a man who made his fortune by skilfully deceiving his audiences via fairgrounds and flim flam – and how he deploys that skill to challenge what he believes to be the fraudulent trickery of the spiritualist mediums, who he is convinced are deceiving their clients, not via circus-style chicanery but rather, and arguably far more sinister, by preying on their emotional vulnerabilities. 

Magic is set in the 1920s when Conan-Doyle was already a widower and on his second marriage and had recently lost numerous close relatives including Kingsley, a much beloved son, to the fighting in the First World War. Haig sets out Conan-Doyle’s belief in the spiritual world as almost obsessive, with the clashes between the writer and the illusionist making for compelling theatre. There are moments in the evening when one feels that the ground is familiar, as some 30 years ago Haig wrote the play My Boy Jack that focussed on Rudyard Kipling’s grief over his only son Jack, who had been killed in the Great War. 

The evening’s physical theatre is magnificent. Hadley Fraser is Houdini, while Haig himself takes on Sir Arthur. Lucy Bailey directs with her usual flair of shocking brilliance that sees the play open to Fraser being suspended upside down while escaping from handcuffs. Fraser masters the scene spectacularly, but the visuals are striking enough to remind one of Bailey’s stunning Titus Andronicus at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2006 that left audiences fainting, such was the impact of her take on that play’s violence.

 

Aside from Fraser wowing the Chichester audience with his immaculate 6-pack, ( This reviewer jealous? Never! ) his take on the escapologist is passionate and convincing. Equally, Haig’s interpretation of the complicated author desperately seeking a connection with his dead son is deeply moving. There is strong work too from Jenna Augen and Claire Price as the spouses Bess Houdini and Jean Conan-Doyle respectively and a fabulous cameo from Jade Williams as Mina Crandon, a famed medium of her time, who Houdini tries to expose. 

The tone of the evening is classy as Bailey and her designer Joanna Parker create ‘just the right level’ of tawdry in the dancing troupe that supports Houdini’s vaudeville turns. The special effects and illusions are fun too – this could almost be a family show if the subject material wasn’t so troublingly dark.

Spellbinding theatre.

Runs until 16th May

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan