Blog Six : Theatre and 'Entzauberung'
Chris Megson, December 2013​

​What kinds of value do audiences find in theatrical performance? What memories of theatre become meaningful in our lives and in what ways do they transform over time? These questions, which are at the heart of the Theatre Spectatorship and Value Attribution project, have prompted me to reflect on my theatregoing over the past year. In this piece, I turn to one particularly powerful experience of spectatorship that has lodged itself in memory.

 

In May, I saw The Bullet Catch at the Shed, the new temporary venue of the National Theatre. Written and performed by the Glaswegian playwright Rob Drummond, the piece was first staged at the Traverse as part of the Edinburgh Fringe in 2012 and subsequently off-Broadway. The show is named after the infamous conjuring illusion that is reputedly so risky to perform even Houdini excluded it from his repertoire: a volunteer from the audience is instructed to fire a loaded gun, point-blank, at the illusionist who then catches the bullet between his or her teeth. The notoriety of the act is explained by one sobering statistic: at least twelve people have died in the history of its stage performance.

 

In fact, Drummond’s show amounts to much more than a reproduction of the Bullet Catch. He also constructs a dramaturgy of meta-magic that raises deeper questions about the illusion it proceeds to enact. The script is interspersed with the ostensibly factual story of two men: William Henderson, a Victorian magician who was killed performing the Bullet Catch in 1912, and Henderson’s luckless volunteer, Charlie Garth, who pulled the trigger on that fateful evening and was left traumatised by the experience (Garth’s letters to his sister are read aloud by the latter-day volunteer working with Drummond onstage). The synthesis of Drummond’s reflective conversation with the audience and the reconstructed historical account opens up a space for philosophical rumination that ranges across the limits of free will (‘Is it possible to make someone do something they don’t want to do?,’ asks Drummond early on), the tension between reality and illusion, and the extent of audience complicity in a potentially murderous spectacle. 

 

Within this fertile combination of lecture and illusion, the expectations of the audience become the substance of drama. Drummond performs a trick - the levitation of a small table - that whets the appetite for the Bullet Catch to follow. In an entirely unexpected turn, he then asks the audience if they want to be shown how the trick is done. To reveal the techniques of the illusionist is, of course, an act of heresy against the Magic Circle, the magicians’ organisation whose non-negotiable motto is indocilis privata loqui (‘not apt to disclose secrets’). On the night I attended the show, as I suspect was the case at most performances, the audience voted - by raising their hands - to have the trick exposed and Drummond obliged by demonstrating exactly how his little table is made to float in the air. And it is this moment that I recall with such strength of feeling more than seven months after the event: the elevation of the table took place in rapt silence, with audience members craning forward in concentration, but Drummond’s disclosure of the trick produced a tangible sense of deflation that marked the evaporation of wonder from the spectacle. This act of demystification is bedded into the dramaturgy in such a way as to contrive anti-climax as an essential ingredient of the show. 

 

I was one of the very few people in the audience to vote against Drummond’s invitation to disclose – it’s probably the only occasion in my life when I have elected to preserve a state of mystification. The vote was carried against my preference and so I, along with my fellow spectators, watched Drummond denude the trick of its mystery and ventilate the workings of ‘magic’. The effect of this moment - specifically, the distinct exhaustion with knowing that it brought to consciousness - reminds me of a famous passage from a lecture given by the philosopher and sociologist Max Weber in 1918, entitled ‘Science as a Vocation’. In the course of a wide-ranging  discussion on the meaning and limits of science, Weber cautions that modernity, with its bureaucracy and scientific rationalism, would lead to what he calls ‘disenchantment of the world’ - in German, ‘entzauberung der welt’, a phrase he borrowed from Schiller: 

 

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world’. Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental […]. 

 

For Weber, ‘enchantment’ is a condition of resistance to the deadening travails of modern life and a bridge to social ‘values’ that nourish private and public experience. He describes these values as ‘ultimate’ and ‘sublime’, adjectives that tend to designate numinous or limit experiences that exceed purely cognitive understanding. Further, he seems to regard art as an important means of oxygenating these ‘values’ in the public sphere. Weber’s argument carries special resonance at the present juncture because entzauberung has surely surfaced, across myriad cultural and political settings, as the existential corollary of postmodern scepticism. When Drummond breaks with the Magic Circle and shows his audience how to levitate a table, he triggers a micro-moment of collective entzauberung; yet, crucially, the rest of the piece, with its gravitational pull towards Drummond’s spell-binding performance of the Bullet Catch, works to reverse this effect entirely: the gun is fired, the bullet is ‘caught’ and displayed, and the experience is utterly electrifying.

 

To return to the question: what kinds of value do audiences find in theatrical performance? The Bullet Catch, it seems to me, gains traction not simply from the performance of a well-known illusion but from its insistence on ‘enchantment’ as a meaningful property of theatrical spectatorship and the collective work of imagination. As such, it was one of my theatrical highlights of 2013.

 

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