The loss of enchantment
Nicholas Harman THE MAGIC CIRCLE: PERFORMING MAGIC THROUGH THE AGES by Michael Bailey Tempus, £18.99, pp. 288, ISBN 9780752442471 © £15.19 (plus 2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Children who have seen an electronic dinosaur wheel across the sky are not much amazed when a man with his sleeves rolled up takes the rabbit out of the hat. Manual illusions have been overtaken by the digital kind, and traditional conjuring is mostly for the nostalgia market. But it finds its niches; Michael Bailey, a former chairman of the Magic Circle (the illusionists' upmarket trade union) who has written its centennial history, modestly describes himself as `the leading British corporate magician'. Far from restoring the fortunes of companies that someone has sawn in half, he helps senior managers with the arcane business of bonding.
Conjuring has gone respectable. For much of its long history it was anything but that. Promoters of dodgy cults used its tricks to lure the credulous, table-turners and spirit-rappers enlisted it to snare their customers. It got less sinister when it became part of showbusiness, in the theatres and music-halls of the late 19th century. The practitioners were men of obscure antecedents, their female assistants ladies of doubtful virtue. But they were well paid for the oohs and aahs they elicited, and bit by bit they gained respect.
The Magic Circle's members never pretended they were anything but tricky entertainers. They even set up an Occult Committee which debunked mystical nonsense like the reputed Indian Rope Trick and the fashionable spirit-mediums promoted by that credulous Irishman, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Like the Freemasons, with whom they share a tradition of businessfriendly mumbo-jumbo, they operate now under royal patronage. Bailey is inordinately proud to number Prince Charles among his members, assuring his readers that the Prince passed his magical entry exam with a creditable performance of the timehonoured cup-and-balls, a trick that has separated many a race-going mug from his money.
The performers whose exploits Bailey describes were a rum lot. The best were above all wonderful craftsmen and deft manipulators, devising apparatus that reliably delivered the appearance of impossibility. The accounts of what they did are interesting and well told, but essentially unsatisfactory, since a central point of Magic Circle membership is an undertaking not to reveal what we, the spectators, really want to know — how it is done. The author is sniffy about the magicians who, in the early 1990s, betrayed some secrets to a television programme. One refused to resign from the Cirle, and was expelled.
Television undermined the business. Even if he plays to packed halls, a physical showman can display his mystery retail, choice bit by bit. He uses up his stock-in-trade wholesale if a million or two people can see him deploy it; for his next show he must develop new turns, and a new turn takes time as well as ingenuity. The one conjurer who transferred his talent with complete success to the small screen was the wonderful Tommy Cooper, whose skill was hilariously to get the tricks all wrong.
Anyway the Americans have taken over the craft. Their domination began more than a century ago with the debut of Houdini, the immortal escapologist (born Erich Weiss, in Budapest) and the Great Lafayette (born Sigmund Neuburger, in Munich). Hollywood itself had similar origins, with which Britain could not compete. From then on magicians had to be goodlooking, and things went downhill.
Michael Bailey admits that the world capital of magic is now Las Vegas, to entertain gamblers who have probably never seen a live performance of anything, and who demand the spectacular, the sensational and the dangerous. One brilliant performer was sadly mauled by his stage accomplice, a tiger (and serve him right for confining a wild animal).
The Magic Circle lost more of its enchantment in the 1990s. First it admitted women to full membership, second it won the Arts Council's blessing and a 'heritage' grant from the National Lottery to build its new headquarters and museum. Edwardian sweat and stuffed shirts had given way to subsidised modernity. Like so many histories of companies, clubs and institutions, this book is in its way a chronicle of changing times, a little parable of the dreaded upto-date.
Previous page
