How do you make Harry Potter vanish?
As the West End blockbuster returns, Claire Allfree asks the man behind the on-stage sorcery how on earth he does it
I‘There have been accidents. I once chopped off a bit of someone’s finger’
am meeting Jamie Harrison, magician extraordinaire and the brains behind the wizardry in the soon-to-reopen Harry Potter and the Cursed Child stage show, with one mission and one mission only: to get him to tell me how he does it. Based on a story by JK Rowling that zips into the future to focus on Harry and Draco Malfoy’s young sons, Albus and Scorpius, at Hogwarts – and adapted by Jack Thorne – the production has been acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic for matching the magic of the books with a sleight-of-hand sorcery that harks back to the golden age of Victorian stage illusions.
There are live Polyjuice Potion transformations, characters that vanish into thin air, and more fire and flying wands than you can shake a broomstick at. Oh, and a stage that, at one point, appears submerged in water.
“I had a fear you might ask me this question,” says Harrison, as affable and effusive in person as a Labrador puppy. “Because obviously I can’t tell you anything…”
Harrison is to theatre what Uri Geller is to spoons – a man who can make the seemingly impossible happen before our very eyes. He’s responsible for the how-did-they-dothat witchcraft in the National’s terrific 2019 adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s fantasy The Ocean at the End of the Lane, including making the same character pop up behind one door and a second later behind another at the opposite end of the stage (it transfers to the West End on October 26). His new touring show, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, based on the Disney adaptation of the Mary Norton classic and which he codirected and designed himself, features, naturally enough, a gravitydefying flying bed. He also co-founded Vox Motus, the Glasgow-based company behind the exquisite, miniaturist theatre piece Flight, recently at London’s Bridge Theatre.
The Cursed Child though, directed by John Tiffany and several years in the planning, is the 43 year old’s masterwork. “The key to making the magic succeed in the mind of the audience is the storytelling,” he says. “If a special effect can become part of a character’s emotional journey, for the audience it transcends being a mere trick or a puzzle and becomes something else. It’s a different form of wonder.”
We are sitting in a little panelled room at the top of the Palace Theatre, on Shaftesbury Avenue, where, somewhere deep in the building, rehearsals are taking place (at which I have been promised we can later take a peek). Harrison is delightful company, deeply knowledgeable about the history of magic and theatre and as interested in an audience’s willing suspension of disbelief as in the skill necessary to produce it. His theory is that, deep down, it’s our fear of death that makes us want to believe. “These moments that defy the physical world: they allow us to believe for a moment that there could be something more.” Trying to glean a few tricks of the trade, however, is proving harder than catching the golden snitch in a game of Quidditch.
Things must go wrong all the time, I suggest casually. After all, the actors aren’t trained magicians. What happens when a trick misfires during a performance? “There is a plan A, and then several backup plans in case something goes wrong,” he admits. “Because it’s really complicated stuff. When we first opened, actors were making mistakes all the time.”
Such as? “Um, er, OK. There’s this moment when Albus crumples up a ball of paper in his hand, takes out his wand, and turns it into a ball of fire. But it took an age to get right. Sometimes the flame would appear several seconds after he had opened his hand, which would be empty. Health and safety make it harder: we had to make sure there was no way he could catch fire. No one can catch fire in this show,” he adds hastily. “It’s impossible.”
What in fact happens is down to good old acting: the performer holds his hand in such a way as to make the audience believe it contains the paper when in fact he has subtly transferred it to the other. “It’s called tension misdirection,” says Harrison. “We use it an awful lot in The Cursed Child. We play with time so that the audience thinks someone is still in a particular position when they are not. Or, that a character must still be on stage because the audience can hear his voice.”
Aha! So something like this must be happening when Albus, Scorpius and Voldemort’s daughter Delphi vanish inside a phone box. Or when the self-sacrificing Snape has his soul sucked by the dementors. What about the moment when black cloaks appear out of nowhere on the new Hogwarts students? “I can’t tell you how we do that. Although I would love to, because the technical expertise of the people who worked on it is extraordinary.”
To what extent does he rely on the technical side of theatre? How much of what we see in The Cursed Child is, for example, a trick of the light? “A huge amount. I work in collaboration with the production team all the time.”
Harrison’s obsession with magic began when, as a child, he had to spend some time in hospital and a family friend bought him a magic set. He became very good, very quickly, and before long was pulling off stunts in the physics department at school with the help of a laser and some fishing wire. Fishing wire is used all the time in magic, apparently. He struck up a relationship with the magician Martin Duffy, who lived locally in Newcastle, and soon started appearing with him on TV in the late 1980s. He became sufficiently skilled that lucrative corporate gigs around the world soon followed, but because he had always been interested in combining magic with narrative, he returned home and went to drama school.
He’s had a few spectacular screw-ups in his time. “I once chopped off a bit of someone’s finger. And there was one occasion when I was meant to make a woman’s engagement ring disappear using a bit of hidden elastic, but instead it pinged past the woman’s ear and stuck itself to the wall behind her.”
Harrison designs nearly all his illusions himself, but admits the founding principles of magic tricks have barely changed in a thousand years. “I once spent months working out how a ball of fire might fly across the audience’s heads. I then discovered that a production that took place in 400AD had done something similar, using exactly the same technique.”
It’s time to go on stage. I get to find out how characters appear and disappear, and how Albus and Scorpius slide down a chimney into real flames without themselves catching fire. And no, I am not going to tell you, not least because Harrison has become a bit tense, in fact he is visibly sweating. Not to mention begging. “My job will be on the line! But seriously, if secrets get out, then everything can be rationalised. And who in truth wants that?”