It’s the cracking of bones that makes you nauseous. “This is the first moment of raw reaction from the audience,” grins Chris Fisher, one of two illusion designers on Stranger Things: The First Shadow, the prequel to the popular TV series. It describes a dreamlike scene that combines the play’s graceful levitation with grotesque, knuckle-clenching violence. Pet lovers are advised to look away. “Netflix was like, ‘How are you going to do the cat?’ “This is where he said.” He looks proud. “There are so many layers to making this look like that. Everyone had to believe it would work.”
The magic on stage is living a moment. Big-budget shows are increasingly using illusion to tell suspenseful stories. “Our job is to use magic techniques to beautify the narrative,” 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 have the giant creature disappear from an otherwise bare scene. Houdini used the tunnel and Paul Daniels used tents to perform a similar trick, 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 audience doesn’t really care how you do it. What they care about is whether they believe it and how it makes them feel.”
With magic, you see the world differently. Nothing is a problem; because there is always a solution
Ten years ago, a consulting magician would be brought into a production to help create an impact. Today, illusion designers are an essential part of the design team, like the lighting or sound team. “We never wanted to create an illusion, make it happen, and make it go away,” says Jamie Harrison, Stranger Things’ other illusion designer and the creator of the harrowing puppets and illusions in last year’s The Ocean at the End. They were in the room when the game was first being designed for Stranger Things.
“At its best, magic is part of the emotional narrative of a work. You connect a moment of visual wonder to a moment of inner discovery,” Harrison says. Both Fisher and Bulleid recall an illusion Harrison created for Sam Mendes’s production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in which Charlie writes a dream-filled letter to Wonka, folds it into a paper airplane, and flies it into the air, doing just that. ; He went out into the audience. The ruse consistently failed, Harrison recalls. “Sam was pulling his hair out. It finally worked, just before the audience arrived. All the kids in the cast were sitting at the stalls. He remembers wide-eyed as the magical little paper plane flew gracefully, as if it had a mind of its own.
This visceral sense of wonder is achieved time and time again in Stranger Things, a game that has magic at its core. There are enormous tentacled monsters and extraordinarily complex dream sequences, but one of the effects Harrison most enjoys is surprisingly simple. “This is when Henry starts foaming at the mouth,” she enthuses. “It’s a small effect, but it enhances the moment.” As the young girl begins to go crazy, foam leaks from her mouth, and as her anger and fear increase, her spit flies across the stage.
It was a broken leg and a dislocated knee that brought Fisher and Harrison into the world of magic. Their stories are oddly similar: As bored children recovering from injuries, they were each given magic sets to keep them busy. The isolating nature of performing magic as adults led them both to theatre. Harrison worked as a magician in five-star hotels in Thailand for a year. “I felt really alone at the end of that year,” he admits. She trained to be an actor, returning to illusions when she founded Vox Motus, a multimedia company based in Glasgow, with her friend Candice Edmunds.
Instead of switching from magic to acting, Fisher switched to stage management. As company manager for We Will Rock You and Wicked, he would conduct “magic Saturdays”, presenting the cast with a new trick after warm-ups each week. Fisher was already there when Harrison was invited to create the illusions in Mendes’ musical. They were immediately successful, and their subsequent collaborations included Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. In fact, it’s hard to name a show in the West End that involves magic without one of them having a hand in it.
Creating an illusion on stage takes more than a handful of talented magicians. The bone-crushing illusion Fisher is so proud of took months of interdepartmental conversations and collaborations. “There’s that kid in all of us,” says set designer Anna Fleischle, “who wants to see something and think, ‘This is impossible.’” Fleischle’s work is intertwined with the world of illusion many times. He and Fisher conceived 2:22 A Ghost Story and the tender musical The Time Traveler’s Wife. “In 2:22 there were clear moments of illusion that you had to realize in the script, but in The Time Traveler’s Wife it’s bigger than that,” Fleischle explains. Magic is a character.”
In the stage adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger’s novel, the heroine disappears repeatedly and reappears at a different period of her life. One of the most surprising effects in the scene is when he bursts through the patio doors and melts away. “It’s on the border between what’s an illusion and what’s calibrated,” says Fleischle. “Chris knew he wanted to do a fade, so part of the set had to be built for that. “We solved this together.” It is a long process that requires trial and persistence. “You have to keep trying because even the slightest change in angle, color or material can reveal what’s going on.”
The set is not just a platform for illusions, but also an integral part of it. Fleischle gleefully explains how his designs can be used for misdirection, creating the rules of the world on stage for the audience and then dismantling them. Imagine needing a hat for an illusion, he says. “If he was there by himself, you would be drawn to him. But if you put more hats somewhere else, you won’t pay attention to it because it’s nothing special.”
He says that by directing the eye and putting the world’s expectations on the stage, design turns into 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,” he says. “An illusionist can make a mechanism that someone else made with a piece of cardboard.” Bulleid describes the role as one of constant problem solving. “You see the world differently because of magic,” he says. “Nothing is a problem because there is always a solution.”
Magicians inevitably get a little tricky when you start talking about the details. But Bulleid, who also studied acting, explains that stealth is not about breaking a trick, but about the feeling it gives. “You will destroy a story,” he says. As the UK’s partner for illusions and magic in Harry Potter, he is responsible for teaching new actors the effects. It also teaches them the value of not explaining 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.”
You feel powerful when you know the secret and no one else does
Even with the input of highly experienced illusion designers and multiple creative teams, onstage magic tricks go wrong. Harry Potter’s disarming spell Expelliarmus took 16 iterations before it worked reliably for the stage play, and even then it was nearly cut. “It was really hard to make it work, and it kept surprising the player,” Harrison recalls. “It’s great to get something working once in the shop, but trying to make something that’s really ambitious and hasn’t been done before work consistently eight times a week is a challenge.”
Technology is increasingly being used alongside or as part of illusion design, but designers all agree that there is little fear of it overriding traditional techniques. “Theatre magic works best with people and things,” Harrison says. “Basically, it’s about being in a room where impossible things happen before your eyes.” It is the strange alchemy of technical skill and creative innovation that allows you to see a bone breaking in front of you, an elephant disappearing, or a paper airplane floating as if adrift; It is so bright and clear that it is impossible to believe that it is not real. .
• Stranger Things: The First Shadow is at London’s Phoenix Theater until 25 August. The Time Traveler’s Wife is at London’s Apollo Theater until 24 February