Magic reviews – controversy between Houdini and Conan Doyle | Section

TDavid Haig has a distinguished reputation as a historian. My Boy Jack (1997), about Rudyard Kipling’s mourning for a child killed in the First World War, and Pressure (2014), about a Scottish meteorologist charged with finding Gen Eisenhower’s D-day weather window, followed by Magic, showing the complex relationship of two giants of entertainment between the wars: Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini.

It intersects with My Boy Jack because, like the author of The Jungle Book, the creator of Sherlock Holmes feels sorry for a child who has been victimized in war. The hope of a reunion brings the author to a group of spirits but causes conflicts with Houdini, the magician is convinced that the events are a fantasy as he escapes from straijackets and water tanks. Happy to have the Scot as a fan, the Hungarian-American is horrified to discover that the author believes he has been blessed with supernatural powers.

The discussion of these men recalls the great conflict between religious and intellectual roles in Peter Shaffer’s plays such as The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Amadeus. As an actor, Haig is generous and generous, always giving good parts to himself and his co-stars. Conan Doyle is the most difficult part because the audience can relate to Houdini’s suspicions but Haig makes the author so clearly bereaved that it seems logical that he killed Sherlock to think about resurrecting his son.

Hadley Fraser’s Houdini has the charisma of a natural spectacle and a constant observation and imagination that, without involving parallels, appeals to Holmes. In the always difficult roles of the wives of famous men, Jean Conan Doyle’s Claire Price and Jenna Augen’s Bess Houdini enrich the evening with a sincerity and confusion that both are very difficult. The governing question of our culture – what people are willing to believe and why – swirls around without shouting.

Director Lucy Bailey is an expert on suspense, having done several Agatha Christie hits (most recently Death on the Nile), and she brings a similar atmosphere and twist to a show that is like a howdunnit, with tricks of a seance and a wonderful Houdini trick at the end. Interestingly, the way Houdini claims to have fooled us may not be the way illusionist John Bulleid brings it to the audience. Underscoring the dangers of any production involving fraud, one interesting fact in the printed material is absent from the show. But these documents show the bravery of the seafaring expert in discovering a new room within the limited space of the Holmes and Houdini apocrypha.