MEET THE MAGIC MAN
Jamie harrison tells JOHN NATHAN how his illusionist skills have brought the story of afghan migrants to life in new play flight
FLIGHT IS a show like no other. There are no actors and no stage. Instead, each member of the audience is led to their own personal one-seat theatre and, through a window, views the story of Afghan brothers Aryan and Kabir as they set off on an epic journey.
The show premiered in 2017 at the Edinburgh International Festival to huge critical acclaim. Now it’s back — its unique style of theatre perfect for our pandemic times, with social distancing already well in place.
‘Aryan is 14 and Kabir is eight’ says Jamie Harrison, who with fellow Vox Motus theatre company founder Candice Edmunds co-directs the 65-minute show. ‘It takes them years to get to London.’
Today the production — part play, part installation — makes its London debut at the Bridge Theatre. In it, the brothers brave bustling train stations, hazardous sea crossings, menacing strangers and threats of violence.
The show is unique, Jamie believes, due to the carousel around which the audience sits, as it conveys 280 individually crafted scenes, and also because of the brothers who are ‘played’ by 380 hand-made models.
‘We were working on another project showing the model of the set to a group of producers,’ says Jamie, ‘Then one of them said, “It’s incredible. You could just reach out and crush them.’” The comment got Jamie and Candice thinking about how to turn Caroline Brothers’ 2011 novel Hinterland into a piece of theatre.
‘We thought there was something really interesting in that relationship, between the viewer being enormous and an almost god-like presence in the space.’
At their smallest, the brothers are a Lilliputian 8mm tall. ‘The concept is that the world is seen through a child’s perspective, like a 3D graphic novel,’ explains Jamie. The piece has 24 hand-made characters including Bruce Willis (Aryan is a big a fan). For research, Jamie and Candice travelled to Paris where many UK-bound migrants and refugees live in unofficial camps.
‘We didn’t meet anyone as young as Aryan and Kabir, but what struck us was their hope and ambition. It’s both inspiring and deeply upsetting because you worry they will never get the chance to do what they want to do. And that’s why we had to find a way to tell this story.’
To that end, Jamie deployed his know-how as one of world’s leading theatrical magic and illusion designers, perhaps most famously for the stage show of Harry Potter And The Cursed Child whose wizardry at least matches anything in the movies.
‘I honestly believe you can do anything on stage,’ says Jamie. ‘It’s a matter of creativity.’
The main advances in magic and illusion have been in health and safety, says Jamie. Take Harry Potter’s fire-making spell ‘incendio’, which involved waving a wand at paper that bursts into flames. ‘In Victorian times illusionists would have been able to do most of the spell. But they wouldn’t have been able to do it as consistently or as safely.’
Jamie could have used a modern, health-and-safety version of the spell when he was a young magician. Occasionally things went badly wrong.
‘I’ve hurt myself performing magic dozens of times,’ he says. ‘I once hurt myself terribly lighting a Christmas candle in Thailand with my bare hands. The candle was on the end of the Prince of Thailand’s sword.
‘He moved so quickly the candle went out and so I had to do it again and wrestle this bit of kit back down my sleeve. It wouldn’t light and I ended up with really bad blisters.
‘Another time, I was doing a magic show at the Wet ‘n’ Wild waterparks where one of my tricks was a finger chopper. You put someone’s finger in a block and slammed down the blade. There’s no way the blade can touch the finger, but a bit of wood came loose and sliced the finger really badly. And because the ground in the park was wet, the dripping blood spread out and we were standing in this huge pool of red.’
Actually, Jamie’s life as a magician started as an accident. Raised in Newcastle, he dislocated his knee at the age of nine and had to spend time in hospital, where a friend’s mother gave him a magic set to play with.
‘My parents were going through a divorce and it was a pretty grim part of my life. But I started showing tricks to nurses and this ability gave me something fun, special and secret. I caught the bug.’
Today, his magician and illusionist skills have allowed him to tell theatre stories in a distinctive and unique way. ‘Candice and I were terrified when we came up with the idea for Flight as it had never been done before. But people who see the show forget about the idea of using models and engage with two little boys who are fleeing Afghanistan to get to London.
‘What I’m proud of is that people buy tickets to see an exciting show, but they come out having had an experience that brings them closer to what it might actually be like.’
Flight is at Bridge Theatre from today until Jan 16, bridgetheatre.co.uk