There is a fascinating tale to be told about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s all encompassing obsession with Spiritualism and his relationship with Harry Houdini, but this isn’t it, writes Matt Wingett.
3 Stars out of 5
There is a widely-held belief that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s obsession with Spiritualism came as the result of his son’s death in World War One.
This belief is wrong.
Firstly, Conan Doyle declared himself a Spiritualist in 1887 while he was working as a GP in Southsea, long before the Great War.
Secondly, his son didn’t die fighting in World War I. Kingsley died of Spanish Flu while working as a doctor at St Thomas’s Hospital in London, in October 1918. This was months after leaving the army – though it’s true he was weakened by his war wounds.
Thirdly, Conan Doyle’s renewed fascination with Spiritualism during the War came as the result of the death of other relatives and especially Lily Loder Symonds, his children’s nanny, who gave Conan Doyle what he believed to be incontrovertible evidence of spirit communication, which she resorted to after the loss of her three brothers, before her own death from grief.
David Haig’s script tramples these facts, implying that Kingsley Conan Doyle was killed by the shot he received in the neck on the first day of the Battle of the Somme (actually the minor wound hospitalised him for 2 months before his return to active service in 1916), and that Jean Conan Doyle, Arthur’s second wife, in the company of Lily Loder Symonds, received a spirit message from the deceased Kingsley (unlikely even if you think it possible; Jean’s relationship with her step-son was rocky, to say the least). Since Symonds’s death in January 1916 long preceded Kingsley’s, David Haig also implies that spirit communication transcends not only the veil of death, but also breaks the arrow of time.
Later in the play there’s a new concoction: that Arthur Conan Doyle first communicated with his deceased son in the company of American medium Mina Crandon at his family home in Crowborough after he met Houdini in 1920.
In fact the inventor of Sherlock Holmes revealed in numerous newspaper interviews that the first supposed communication from his deceased son occurred in Southsea, Portsmouth, after he gave a talk on death and the hereafter at the Portland Hall, in June 1919.
The liberties the script takes with reality stretch on and on. I get it: don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. But there are so many inconsistencies and inaccuracies that it undermines a far more interesting story, ie: the real one. The script starts out wonky and gets more shonky all the way.
Meanwhile, Jean Conan Doyle (née Leckie) who is widely regarded as a controlling woman by those who have studied the Conan Doyle milieu (for example, after Conan Doyle’s death Jean went through her husband’s correspondence, destroying everything from his deceased first wife in order to make herself the focus of the historical record) is portrayed as well-meaning, possibly deluded, but not manipulative.
It should be remembered that before the war Jean disapproved of Conan Doyle attending seances, because she didn’t want him trying to contact his dead wife. Miss Jean Leckie had waited in the wings for 10 years for Louisa Conan Doyle to die of tuberculosis, receiving from her lover the unlikely sobriquet “Platonic mistress” during what must have been an excruciating decade that included secret meetings in hotels, as the 1901 census record attests. But when Jean’s brother Malcolm died in the first months of the war, the embargo on seances was lifted, and Jean suddenly developed her own mediumistic powers.
When you consider that Jean later claimed to come under the control of her spirit guide, Pheneas, when there were family disagreements to resolve (Pheneas, always sided with Jean, leaving an awed Conan Doyle bowing to his wife’s supernatural last word), then the question as to her manipulativeness is largely answered.
All this true biography could provide a rich background to the story of Conan Doyle’s Spiritualism. Yet Magic ignores it.
There are moments in Haig’s play which do take life.
The séance scenes have the benefit of being visually and auditorally powerful, the effect, with strobe lights, booming soundtrack, screams and writhing limbs lifted straight from horror movies.
But generally there is a flatness throughout, as well as a problem with authenticity.
The musicians supposed to give a vaudevillian atmosphere to Houdini’s showbiz life don’t play their instruments; the dance routines don’t have the energy needed for the fever of the packed 1920s music theatre; the opening scene in which Houdini’s entourage is shown in film projection (projected on curtains and viewed from the side, the image was almost entirely obscured) running the streets pursued by cops (at this stage it is unclear whether this is a dramatised representation of Houdini’s life) segues uncomfortably into a clumsy stage act which misses the power in the escapologist’s routine: to dramatically set up an impossible task for the audience to gasp at, rather than present it as an off-shoot of The Keystone Kops.
These effects aside, what is left? The main body of the play is a series of rather earnest discussions between Houdini, his wife Bess, Doyle and Jean during which none of the dialogue really skewers the truth or hits home. At its heart, we have 90 minutes of two slightly dull guys disagreeing with each other interspersed with seances and some overly elaborate scene changes. The subtleties of self-deceiving belief and the power-plays within Conan Doyle’s entourage are entirely missed.
And there are comically ironic moments. That Conan Doyle should tell the master illusionist that he was really achieving his magic effects by paranormal means is certainly a testimony to Houdini’s brilliance – and Conan Doyle’s childish desire to be fooled.
And my goodness, what a bore Conan Doyle is in this portrayal. He has the steady unexpressive tone one encounters when an obsessive talks about their particular monomania. I’ve met a few in my time, from the man on the train who’d memorised the railway timetable for the whole of Southern England (he was much less interesting than even this description implies) through a friend who can tell me in excruciating detail how he rebuilt a classic car to… (I’ll stop here, slightly panicked, because maybe I am that man, too, in the context of Conan Doyle…) You get the picture.
By the play’s end, the audience is left with the impression that Conan Doyle’s gullibility stemmed from the loss of his son. In reality, the supernatural was present either implicitly or explicitly throughout much of Doyle’s life.
His first short story The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe, written when he was 19 (only recently discovered and first published in 2000), displays with extraordinary clarity the tension in his personality between the believer in spirits and the rational mind personified by Sherlock Holmes. In the story, a sceptical young investigator of deeply analytical bent and his narrator friend (does this set-up sound familiar?) investigate a supposedly haunted house – only to discover that ghosts are real.
These two opposing creative strands later separated into Doyle’s horror stories and his Sherlock Holmes tales, but the horror story remained obvious in Holmes through use of settings such as the lonely Baskerville Hall in its mysterious moor, and in the bloody murders throughout the Holmes oeuvre. Indeed, despite Haig’s Conan Doyle claiming to have “completely stopped” writing Holmes stories during the period he knew Houdini (something Haig also repeated on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row), in fact the Gothic elements in Holmes continued with such tales such as The Adventure of the Creeping Man (1923), and The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire (1924), among others.
Conan Doyle thrived on the unexplained, the lurid and the supernatural from the very start of his writing career. It was grist to his creative mill, and his fascination with the paranormal drove him into experimenting with telepathy and attending seances while in his 20s, more than 30 years before Kingsley died.
Conan Doyle was a larger-than-life, imposing figure, a keen boxer, as Haig displays, a man driven by a passion for his subject. But he was also 6 feet two inches tall and (as early film footage attests) spoke with a subtle, educated Edinburgh lilt. He was not Haig’s shortish, balding Home-Counties-accented cosy-if-slightly-boring Englishman, but identifiably a Scot – not only another missed dimension in the play, but one which Haig bafflingly goes out of his way to suppress, claiming Doyle’s Scottish accent was knocked out of him at public school.
In all, what does this point to?
There is a series of choices to take with a person’s biography when attempting to present it in dramatic form, and the reality of a person’s life can be inconvenient to a playwright, especially if they are seeking to expound their own themes rather than explore the real lives of the play’s subjects. But there comes a point when a fictionalised account deviates so far from real events and motives, it no longer contains a relation to truth – even allowing for artistic licence.
To anyone who knows about Doyle’s life, Magic is deeply unsatisfactory. It tries to perform a psychological deep dive into the relationship of two real men with opposing views on Spiritualism, but its characters have only a fleeting resemblance to the real people. At the same time it ignores a rich seam of bizarre biographical and psychological facts waiting to be mined.
There is undoubtedly “magic” to be found somewhere in the story of Houdini and Doyle – two historic titans of popular culture.
But in Haig’s play the magic is to be found in the way the real Doyle and Houdini vanish before the audience’s eyes.
Matt Wingett is the organiser of Holmes Fest, an annual celebration of the life and times of Arthur Conan Doyle in Portsmouth, and the author of Conan Doyle and the Mysterious World of Light, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Adventures In Portsmouth and Southsea, and editor of The Southsea Stories and Beyond, The Complete Uncollected Short Stories of Arthur Conan Doyle.
