It’s the cracking of the bones that really turns your stomach. “That’s the first moment of raw reaction from the audience,” grins Chris Fisher, one of the two illusion designers on Stranger Things: The First Shadow, the stage prequel to the hit TV series. He’s describing a dreamlike sequence in the play that combines elegant levitation with grotesque, knuckle-clenching violence. Pet-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 get that to look like it does. Everyone had to have faith it would work.”
Magic on stage is having a moment. Big-budget shows are increasingly using illusions to help tell stories full of wonder. “Our job is to use magic techniques to embellish the narrative,” says John Bulleid, illusion designer for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s forthcoming A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In The Magician’s Elephant for the RSC, Bulleid was asked to make the giant titular creature disappear from an otherwise bare stage. Houdini used a tunnel to do 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 make a coin vanish, the audience doesn’t really care how you did it. What they care about is whether they believe it, and how it made them feel.”
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