It’s the crunching of the bones that really turns your stomach. “That’s the first moment of raw audience reaction,” grins Chris Fisher, one of the two illusion designers of Stranger Things: The First Shadow, the stage prequel to the hit TV series. He describes a dreamlike scene in the play that combines elegant levitation with grotesque, knuckle-cracking violence. Animal lovers would be advised to avert their eyes. “That was the one where Netflix said, ‘How are you going to do the cat?’” He looks proud. “There are so many layers to make it look like that. Everyone had to trust that it would work.”
Magic on stage is having a moment. Big-budget shows are increasingly using illusions to tell stories of wonder. “Our job is to use magical techniques to enhance 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 gigantic titular creature disappear from an otherwise barren stage. Houdini used a tunnel to perform a similar trick and Paul Daniels used 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 make a coin disappear, the public doesn’t really care how you did it. What matters to them is whether they believe it and how it made them feel.”
Magic makes you see the world differently. Nothing is a problem because there is always a solution
Ten years ago, a production called in a consulting magician to help achieve an effect. Today, illusion designers are a core part of the design team, just like the lighting or sound crew. “We never wanted to drive into an illusion, perform it, and send it out again,” says Jamie Harrison, Stranger Things’ other illusion designer, and creator of the heartbreaking puppetry and illusions in last year’s The Ocean at the End. van de Laan. For Stranger Things, they were in the room when the piece was first conceived.
“At its best,” says Harrison, “magic is part of the emotional story of a piece. You link a visual moment of wonder to an internal 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, with Charlie writing a dream-filled letter to Wonka, folding it into a paper airplane and tossing it up, while the plane flew up. out into the audience. The trick kept failing, Harrison recalls. “Sam pulled his hair out. Then, finally, just before the crowd entered, it worked. All the kids in the cast happened to be in the stalls. He remembers them wide-eyed as the magical paper plane flew gracefully as if it had a mind of its own.
That visceral sense of wonder is achieved repeatedly in the Stranger Things play, which has magic in its marrow. There are huge tentacled monsters and extremely complex dream sequences, but one of the effects Harrison enjoys most is surprisingly simple. “It’s the moment when Henry starts foaming at the mouth,” he says enthusiastically. “It’s a small effect, but it magnifies the moment.” Foam oozes from the teen’s mouth as he begins to rage, saliva flying across the stage as his anger and fear escalate.
It was a broken leg and a dislocated knee that brought Fisher and Harrison into the world of magic. Their stories are strangely similar: like bored children recovering from injuries, they were all given magical sets to keep them occupied. As adults, the isolating nature of performing magic pushed them both to the theater. Harrison worked for a year as a magician for 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 and returned to illusions when he founded Vox Motus, a Glasgow-based multimedia company, with his girlfriend Candice Edmunds.
Instead of moving from magic to acting, Fisher went into stage management. As company manager of We Will Rock You and Wicked, he ran ‘magic Saturdays’, presenting the cast with a new trick every week after warm-up. When Harrison was invited to perform the illusions of Mendes’ musical, Fisher was already there. They hit it off immediately and their subsequent collaborations included Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. In fact, it’s hard to name a West End show with magic that one of them hasn’t had a hand in creating.
Creating an illusion on stage takes more than just a handful of talented magicians. The bone-breaking illusion that Fisher is so proud of took months of interdepartmental conversations and collaborations. “We all have that child inside us,” says set designer Anna Fleischle, “where we want to see something and think, ‘That’s impossible.’” Fleischle’s work is intertwined countless times with the world of illusions. She and Fisher designed 2:22 A Ghost Story and the tenderhearted musical The Time Traveller’s Wife. “With 2:22 there were clear moments of illusion that you had to fulfill in the script,” Fleischle explains, “but with Time Traveller’s Wife it’s bigger than that. Magic is a 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 stunning effects on stage is when he walks through French doors and simply melts away. “It borders on what is illusion and what is fixed,” says Fleischle. “Chris knew he wanted to do a fade, so part of the set had to be built for that. We worked it out together.” It is a long process that requires experimentation and perseverance. “You have to keep trying because the slightest change in angle, color or material can reveal what’s going on.”
The set is not just a platform for the illusions, but is an integral part of them. Fleischle cheerfully explains how her designs can be used for deception, setting up rules of the world for the audience on stage, which they then take away. Imagine, she suggests, that you need a hat for an illusion. “If that stood alone, you’d be drawn to it. But if you put more hats elsewhere, you don’t pay attention to it, because it’s nothing special.”
By guiding the eye and putting the world’s expectations on stage, she says, design becomes a magic trick in itself. What surprises Fleischle most about working with magicians is the amount of innovation involved. “There’s no big rule book with these illusions in it,” she says. “One illusionist could build a device where someone else could do it with a piece of cardboard.” Bulleid describes the role as one of constant problem solving. “With magic you see the world differently,” he says. “Nothing is a problem, because there is always a solution.”
When you start talking about details, magicians inevitably get a little crafty. But Bulleid, who also trained as an actor, explains that secrecy is not about spoiling a trick, but about the feeling it gives. “You’re destroying a story,” he says. As the British assistant for illusions and magic on Harry Potter, he is responsible for teaching the effects to the new cast. He also teaches them the value of not revealing the method. “We play 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 multiple brilliant creative teams, magic tricks go wrong on stage. Expelliarmus, the disarming spell from Harry Potter, went through sixteen iterations before it worked reliably for the play, and even then it was almost cut. “It was very difficult to make it work and it kept putting the actor off,” Harrison recalls. “It’s all very well to get something working once in a workshop, but getting it to work consistently, eight times a week, when it’s really ambitious and hasn’t been done before, is tricky.”
Technology is increasingly being used alongside or as part of illusion design, but designers all agree that there is little fear that it will override traditional techniques. “Theatrical magic works best with people and with objects,” says Harrison. “Essentially, it’s about being in the room with impossible things happening before your eyes.” It is the strange alchemy of technical skill and creative innovation that allows you to see a bone break in front of you, an elephant disappear or a paper airplane fly as if caught in the current – so crisp and clear that it it is impossible to believe that it is not real .
• Stranger Things: The First Shadow runs until August 25 at the Phoenix Theater in London. The Time Traveller’s Wife runs until February 24 at the Apollo Theater in London