Seen at the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh
Four stars
IN the theatre is a stage. On the stage is a panelled room. In the panelled room is a wardrobe. In the wardrobe is a music box. Like Russian dolls, these boxes within boxes promise revelations, but provide only further layers of obfuscation.
Just as the music box dulls the sound of domestic violence coming from a neighbouring room, so the bigger boxes divert us from the truth about life and death. Set in the era of the Great Lafayette, Peter Arnott's play is about two Victorian magicians whose "spirit box" offers the bereaved and the credulous the possibility of talking to those beyond the grave.
Their act may be "a crime against reason", but it is slick enough to captivate Lady Noyes-Woodhull (Anita Vettesse), whose husband is presumed dead in darkest Africa. Determined to think rationally, this "spiritual scientist" finds the desire to believe in the mystical too strong to resist once the brothers Davenport - based on two real 19th-century illusionists - perform their act.
It's the same for the 21st-century audience, some of whom end up on stage wearing Victorian garb in this playful, magic-infused production by Jamie Harrison and Candice Edmunds for Vox Motus and the Lyceum. As much as any supernaturalist, we want to believe Scott Fletcher, as Willie Davenport, really can communicate with his dead sister and that their "spectacular stage seance" is more than the trick his real-life brother Ryan Fletcher says it is.
It's as if The Infamous Brothers Davenport is pulling a sleight of hand on us. We come to the theatre in search of spiritual truth, but find only flying tambourines and levitating tables. The show dazzles and delights, makes us laugh and jump, but stops short of giving us the insight into mortality it promises. And that may be the point.
© Mark Fisher, 2012
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