![]() ![]() Photograph: EO Hoppé/CorbisĬonan Doyle, a medical doctor and the creator of that great rationalist, Sherlock Holmes, might seem like an unlikely person to fall for the claims of mediums. Jean Conan Doyle shared her husband’s belief that the dead could speak to the living. It was Houdini’s public campaign to expose fraudulent mediums who he described as “human leeches” – particularly Margery Crandon, a Boston medium who performed scantily clad and on occasion apparently emitted ectoplasm from her vagina – that led to a rift between the two men that had not healed by the time that Houdini died from a ruptured appendix in 1926. Early in his career, before he found fame as an escape artist, Houdini and his wife, Bess, were not above drawing on their own theatrical skills to give public seances on the vaudeville circuit in order to ensure there was bread on the table. Houdini, the showman, longed to believe that he might be able to communicate beyond the grave with his beloved mother, but knew far too much about the trickery and faking of the stage to be easily convinced. What, after all, is the spirit cabinet used by famed practitioners such as the Davenport Brothers, but a form of puppet theatre that appears to animate the dead?įollowing the death of his son, Kingsley, during the first world war, Conan Doyle became a devout believer in life after death and an untiring missionary for the spiritualist cause, donating the equivalent of millions of pounds in today’s money in trying to prove that the dead were all around us and eager for a chat. ![]() It’s about controlling what people see and don’t see.” Many 19th- and early 20th-century mediums used theatrical techniques. Theatre is all about directing the eye,” Eidinow says, “and where people look. “There is something interesting about the way he was always so convinced by the evidence of his own eyes. Cox has even been learning some magic tricks.ĭirector Hannah Eidinow is fascinated that Conan Doyle, who believed he saw the faces of the dead, including his own nephew, in a photograph (later proved to be a fake) taken at the Cenotaph, once set up in practice as an eye doctor. The show plays upon the duality of theatre and the way it uses sleight of hand and sleight of mind to make us see what does not exist. Their story is told in Impossible, a play that premieres at the Pleasance on the Edinburgh fringe with Phill Jupitus as Conan Doyle and Alan Cox as Houdini. Since it often also involves the audience suspending disbelief, it is a good place to explore the tale of the two men, one who believed the most important thing was to “ prove immortality”, and one who feared it was impossible. ![]() It has been described by Alice Rayner in Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre as “a specific site where appearance and disappearance reproduce the relations between the living and the dead”. The theatre is a place where ghosts rise. Phill Jupitus as Conan Doyle and Alan Cox as Houdini in Impossible, premiering at this year’s Edinburgh festival. ![]()
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