SAD HEARTS AND SHOWBIZ
The play begins in a pure music-hall moment: below the stage a hammeringly jolly piano, onto it a capering leg-show chorus and sparklers, ushering in The Great Houdini. Who is Hadley Fraser , debonair and showmanlike. He must, of course, immediately be hung upside down by the ankles in his vest, braces and NYPD handcuffs (the latter previously tested on an alarmed front- row lady) and swiftly wriggle out of them to wild drumbeats and applause.
Then we are backstage where the hero greets his own hero, David Haig as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. There’s a session of boxing-chat, sparring and mutual literary admiration while their wives (Claire Price and a drily comic Jenna Augen) look on resignedly. After two acts of thrilling and revealing arguments, director Lucy Bailey keeping the scenes changing with choreographed elegance, the same pair will end on the same vaudevillian stage. But this time the trick will end with a moment of lonely metaphor which might leave you, like me, more moved than you ever expected. The handcuffs of mortality and grief are not so easily thrown off: some trick walls you can’t walk through.
Playwright-actor David Haig dealt poignantly with Kipling’s WW1 bereavement in “My Boy Jack” , and thrillingly with D-Day meteorological science in “`Pressure”. He reads, thinks and empathises deeply with the changes, hopes and delusions of a century ago. So you couldn’t ask for a better sensitivity to deal, historically and emotionally, with a peculiar 1920 moment of feuding friendship: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle versus Harry Houdini, with spiritualism as the battlefield.
The creator of Sherlock Holmes had lost his son at the Somme and been widowed. Remarrying Jean, an occult “medium” , he plunged more deeply into his lifelong fascination with spiritualism. With a medical background, he was excited by the new frontiers of science – electrical currents, molecules, radio transmission – and like many thinkers of the time he borrowed their language and mystery to feed into a belief that the dead could speak to us through seances. There were so many dead after 1918; as he says “spiritualism brings solace to a tortured world”.
His friend Houdini the showman escapologist – and the odd couple were tight friends for some years – was also mourning his Jewish-Hungarian mother. But equally he was a rigorous sceptic: when his fame and fortune rose he poured money, research, and careful tests into debunking the hordes of opportunist mediums. At times both men, the celebrity British author and the lairy showman, were on the transatlantic lecture circuit. Houdini would be decrying and mocking the credulous followers, Doyle in the same cities preaching the believers’ gospel, his wife – quite darkly – warning Houdini about how many people , and his audiences, were angry with him for his unbelief. Topical, eh?.
Early in the friendship, in a chilling half-dark scene on a slow revolve, Sir Arthur and his wife Jean host the American visitor to one of their daily séances. The medium does a spectacular screaming trance, Houdini writes in a notebook, and late at night is found by his host having crept downstairs to examine the light fittings and seance-table for trickery. But the drama and humanity lies is in the way that the men try to stay friends.
The play is elegantly, artfully gripping in its blend of sadness, anger, and personal pride (Haig beautifully evokes that blend: Fraser becomes gradually ever more stridently showmanlike). Sir Arthur at one point is put “in touch “with his lost son Kingsley and utterly believes it, and the conflict heats up when Jean Doyle plays medium and claims to contact Houdini’s mother: he, tight-lipped, tries for a moment of hope but is too honest with himself. False hope must die. Of course it’s nonsense, the “spirit”failed to speak Yiddish or call him by his real name, Eric. So of course Conan Doyle accuses his friend of insulting his wife…
There are wonderful ironies. Houdini, who after each hysterical-emotional session just drily says “I observe trifles”, mentions that this after all is what Sherlock Holmes does. Whereon Sherlock’s creator strikes back with the fictional ‘tec’s famous line about how , if you eliminate every other probability, the impossible must be true . Conan Doyls also constantly tries to persuade the escapologist that he really is summoning and using “a great force” of spirituality, all magically tied up with waves and molecules, so that’s how he does his miracles and escapes from trunks and cells and chains in the Hudson river., etc. Houdini persistently says no he does NOT have some weird occult force: it’s all technical trickery, practice, a lot of keys and a dislocatable shoulder.
This argument is given a lookingglass equivalent after a cracking brawl when Houdini disrupts and exposes the medium Mina (Jade Williams). She just shouts insults at him as a “dirty Jew”, but her partner-manager brings up the same argument that Doyle tried : OK yes, sometimes there’s room for the use of trickery. But only when the real manifestation can’t happen, because people are getting in its way by doubting it.,,
Poor Conan Doyle can never accept the fakery of mediums, nor even the fact that his friend is a clever conjurer with no occult powers. His grief won’t allow it. When he pleadingly says “Six times I have spoken with my son!” Harry replies brutally “no, you haven’t!” The pain is real. And yes, it moves the heart.
Cft.org.uk. To 16 May
Rating 4
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