by The cracking of the bones is what really turns your stomach. “That was the first moment of raw reaction from the audience,” quips Chris Fisher, one of the two illusion designers on Stranger Things: The First Shadow, the prequel to your favorite TV series. He describes a dreamlike sequence in the play that combines graceful levitation with grotesque, bone-chilling violence. Pet lovers are advised to avert their eyes. “That’s the one Netflix said, ‘How are you going to do the cat?'” He looks proud. “There are so many layers to adapting that. Everyone had faith that it would work.”
There is a moment of magic on stage. Big budget shows are using illusions to help tell stories full of wonder. “Our job is to use magical techniques to embellish the story,” says John Bulleid, illusion designer for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s upcoming A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In The Magician’s Elephant for the RSC, Bulleid was asked to make the titular gigantic creature out of a barely-there stage. Houdini used a tunnel to perform a similar trick and Paul Daniels employed tents, but Bulleid had nothing to hide in or behind. He smiles as he refuses to tell me how he did it. “Magic is the purest form of storytelling,” he says. “If you manage to lose a coin, the audience doesn’t care how you did it. What matters to them is whether they believe it, and how it made them feel.”
You see the world differently with magic. Nothing matters – because there is always a solution
Ten years ago, a production would be called a consulting magician to help achieve an effect. Today, illusion designers are an integral part of the design team, like the lighting or sound crew. “We never wanted to make a wheel in a distraction, make it and spin it,” says Jamie Harrison, the other illusion designer on Stranger Things, and the creator of the heartbreaking puppetry and illusions in last year’s The Ocean at the End. the Lane. For Stranger Things, they were in the room when the drama was first conceived.
“At its best,” says Harrison, “magic is part of the emotional narrative of a piece. You connect a visual moment of wonder with an inner moment of discovery.” Both Fisher and Bulleid recall an illusion Harrison created for Sam Mendes’ production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that did just that, where Charlie wrote a dream letter to Wonka, folded it into a paper airplane and threw it up, the a plane soaring out into the audience. The trick kept failing, Harrison remembers. “Sam was tearing his hair out. Then finally, just before the audience came in, it worked. It happened that all the children in the team were sitting in the stalls.” He remembers them wide-eyed as the magical little paper plane flew gracefully as if it had a mind of its own.
That wonder is achieved again and again in the magical drama Stranger Things. There are giant tentacled monsters and extremely complex dream sequences, but one of the effects that Harrison’s taste is extremely simple. “That’s the moment Henry starts foaming at the mouth,” he enthuses. “It’s a tiny effect but it adds to the moment.” The teenager’s mouth oozes foam as he begins to raving, spit flying across the stage as his anger and fear increase.
It was a broken leg and a dislocated knee that led Fisher and Harrison into the world of magic. Their stories are similar: as bored kids recovering from injuries, they were all given magical sets to keep them going. As adults, the isolated nature of magic pushed them both into theatre. Harrison spent a year working as a magician on a circuit of five star hotels in Thailand. “By the end of that year, I felt very lonely,” he admits. He trained as an actor, returning to illusion when he founded Vox Motus, a multimedia company based in Glasgow, with his friend Candice Edmunds.
Rather than move from magic to acting, Fisher went into stage management. As the company manager of We Will Rock You and Wicked, he would lead “Day Saturdays” and present the team with a new trick each week after the warm-up. When Harrison was invited to perform the illusions on musician Mendes, Fisher was already there. They hit it off immediately and their subsequent collaborations include Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. In fact, it’s hard to name a show in the West End involving magic that one of them didn’t have a hand in.
It takes more than a handful of talented magicians to create an illusion on stage. Fisher’s bone-cracking illusion is the pride of months of cross-departmental conversations and collaboration. “We all have that child in us,” says set designer Anna Fleischle, “where we want to see something and think, ‘That’s impossible.'” Fleischle’s work is often intertwined with life. the illusions. She and Fisher designed 2:22 A Ghost Story and the tender musical The Time Traveller’s Wife. “With 2:22 there were clear moments of illusion that you have to fulfill in the script,” explains Fleischle, “but with The Time Traveler’s Wife, it’s more than that. Magic is character.”
In the stage adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger’s novel, the main character repeatedly disappears and reappears at a different time in his life. One of the most touching effects on stage is when he walks through the patio doors and simply melts away. “It’s demarcating what is illusion and what is fixed,” says Fleischle. “Chris knew he wanted to step up, so it was necessary to build some of the team for that. We worked it out together.” It is a long process that requires experimentation and persistence. “You have to keep trying because the slightest change in angle or color or subject matter can reveal what’s going on.”
The set is not just a platform for the illusions, but an integral part of it. Fleischle explains with glee how her designs can be used for misdirection, taking the rules of the world on stage for the audience and trying to take them away. Imagine, she says, that you need a hat for an illusion. “If that was there by itself, you would be drawn to it. But if you put more hats elsewhere, you don’t notice it because there’s nothing special.”
By guiding the eye and setting the world’s expectations on the stage, she says, design performs its own magic trick. What surprises Fleischle most about working with magicians is the amount of innovation involved. “There’s no big rulebook for those illusions,” she says. “One illusionist could build a contraption where someone else could with a bit of cardboard.” Bulleid describes the role as one of constant problem solving. “You see the world differently with magic,” he says. “It’s not a problem because there’s always a solution.”
When you start talking about specialties, magicians definitely get a little shifty. But Bulleid, who also trained as an actor, explains that the secret to spoiling a trick is not about the feeling it gives. “You’re going to spoil a story,” he says. As the United Kingdom’s association for illusion and magic on Harry Potter, he is responsible for teaching the new casts the effects. It also teaches them the value of not revealing the method. “We make games where we teach them secrets,” he says, “and explain how powerful it feels when you know the secret and no one else does.”
It feels powerful when you know the secret and no one else does
Even with highly experienced illusion designers and the input of an amazingly diverse creative team, magic tricks on stage go wrong. Expelliarmus, the disarming horror in Harry Potter, went through 16 iterations before it worked reliably for the stage play, and even then, it was almost cut. “It was really hard to get him to work and he kept annoying the actor,” Harrison recalls. “It’s good to get something to work once in a workshop, but it’s hard to get it to work consistently, eight times a week, when it’s really ambitious and hasn’t been done before.”
Technology is increasingly used in conjunction with or as part of illusion design, but all designers agree that there is little fear that it supersedes traditional techniques. “Theatrical magic works best with people and things,” says Harrison. “Basically, it’s about being in the room with impossible things happening before your eyes.” It’s the strange alchemy of technical skills and creative innovation that allows you to see a broken bone in front of you, an extinct elephant or a flying paper airplane as if you’re caught on a stream – so bright and clear , can’t believe it’s not true. .
• Stranger Things: The First Shadow is at the Phoenix Theatre, London, until 25 August. The Time Traveller’s Wife is at the Apollo theatre, London, until 24 February
