Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
✭✭✭✭✭
by Rob Drummond, directed by Rob Drummond & David Overend
The Arches (Glasgow), Luminato, Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs, Toronto
June 14-15, 2014
“It’s all about you and me”
Rob Drummond’s Bullet Catch is one of the most unusual magic shows you’ll ever see. The nominal purpose of the 75-minute show is to see Drummond perform the title stunt, the most dangerous magic trick in history. Yet, Drummond is interested not just in the stunt itself but in the psychology of the audience who has come to see it and, ultimately, in the psychology of any audience who attends a magic show. As a result Drummond’s show is not just entertaining but demonstrates a philosophical awareness that many will find equally exciting.
The stunt of a magician catching a bullet shot from a gun in his hand or in his teeth was first mentioned in writing in 1631. The magician who popularized it was the Scotsman John Henry Anderson who began demonstrating it in 1840 and toured with it to the US and Australia. The trick is notoriously dangerous with at least twelve magicians who died on stage because of it. The most famous example was the America magician William Ellsworth Robinson (1861-1918), who performed under the name Chung Ling Soo. He was shot dead on stage in London in 1918. This led the famous Harry Houdini never to perform it and to counsel younger magicians like Harry Kellar not to do it.
Drummond provides us with all this background but focusses on a magician named William Henderson who was killed on stage in 1914 in London by Charles Garth, a volunteer chosen from the audience. Given the guilt that Garth suffered afterwards as revealed in his letters to his sister, Drummond takes extra care in choosing his volunteer. After a massive show of hands for those wishing to volunteer, Drummond adds one proviso after another that whittle the number to just a few. Will you feel comfortable reading out loud on stage? Will you feel comfortable talking about your personal life on stage?
From the remaining few, he chooses three and uses a magic trick – “Who has the black ball? – to determine their characters. He makes them respond “Yes” to every question he puts to them, no matter whether if that is the right answer, and through eye contact notes whether they are lying or not. No matter how he finds the black ball, he invites that one on stage where he, in this case Edwin, remains for nearly the whole length of the show. Drummond wants the volunteer to identify with his historical counterpart and so has him read from Garth’s letters which reveal his despair at what he had done even though it was an accident, his thoughts of suicide and being called a murderer even after an inquest cleared him of wrongdoing. What is most disturbing is that Garth suspects that Henderson, who had been given to bouts of “melancholia”, may actually have wanted to die.
Interspersed with these readings, Drummond seeks to forge a bond with the man who will come to shoot him. He does this through various mind reading stunts – like guessing a specific word Edwin is concentrating on – that are truly amazing. At one point Drummond asks Edwin’s help in levitating a small side table. With each man holding two corners of the cloth on the square table, the table rises off the floor and glides to centre stage.
The curious effect is that having one’s rational curiosity satisfied in seeing how the trick is done comes nowhere near the irrational amazement in seeing the illusion performed. After his explanation Drummond completely disassembles the table and puts all its parts in a fitted aluminum suitcase, thus reinforcing the sense of loss that a wonder has now merely become a trick.
The table illusion and its explanation, however much it may anger other magicians, is key to what Drummond seeks to achieve in his show. The illusion and its deconstruction ask why it is we have come to see a magic show. Drummond’s table trick reveals that we come knowing that all the magic we see has rational explanations. But that is not the reason we attend. What we really want is for the magician to make us believe, even for a few minutes, that natural laws can be broken, that the impossible is possible. The relationship between the audience and the performer is one of trust and willingness to believe.
This relationship is crystallized on stage in the one between the magician and the volunteer who will shoot him. The magician has to trust that the volunteer will not do anything foolish when armed with a loaded weapon. The volunteer has to trust that in shooting the magician in the face he is only acting his part in an illusion. The mention of past accidents in the bullet catch and in the possibility that a magician could use the trick as a means of suicide are there to undermine our belief that everything will go well. They succeed so well that once the show reaches the key moment when the volunteer must aim the loaded Baretta 92 directly across the stage at Drummond’s mouth and fire, some volunteers in the past have been unable to do it.
At one point earlier in the show, Drummond asks the volunteer about his religious beliefs. Drummond has already told us that his father is a clergyman, but the question at first seems rather intrusive for a magic show. It turns out that it doesn’t matter what the volunteers says. Rather, what is important is that Drummond has raised the question. Have we actually come to a show called Bullet Catch excited by the possibility that the trick could go wrong? Or have we come to the show to see a man present the illusion of a human being defying death in a spectacular manner?
What makes Bullet Catch such an unusual magic show is that Drummond forces us to assess out own beliefs and morality while we are in the process of watching. Some of the growing anxiety we feel as the show reaches its climax comes from our recognition of the our own conflicting feelings in watching such a stunt where one possible outcome is death.
Drummond’s unassuming low-key manner belies an internal intensity most noticeable in his eyes. We exit the theatre glad that Drummond has survived the stunt one more time, but intrigued or even troubled by the questions that the show has raised. Bullet Catch pushes to an extreme the attitude that any audience experiences when it goes to the theatre – the desire to be entertained and to learn from experiencing a simulacrum of reality – all the while knowing it is only a simulacrum. Why do we do this? Why do we need this? At the very end Drummond, gesturing to himself and us, says, “It’s all about you and me.” Drummond for all his modesty asks us to ponder theatre’s most essential questions – rather a remarkable achievement for “just” a magic show.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Rob Drummond and volunteer, ©2013 Carol Rosegg; Rob Drummond, ©2012 Colin Hattersley.
For tickets, visit http://luminatofestival.com.
2014-06-15
Bullet Catch