ABSTRACT
As an exercise while teaching a workshop at the Actors’ Centre in London, Rose English gave each of the participants a photograph of a theatrical performer. The students had to pretend that they were this performer, and improvise an appropriate life story. One woman was particularly impressive. The photo she had been given was of a magician and his lady assistant, and she spoke of their life in convincing detail. When English questioned her afterwards about the improvisation, the woman confessed that she knew the couple in the photograph, that they were Bob Brown and Brenda, that they had visited her home and that her own son, Paul, was also a magician. He was subsequently to appear as one of the two magicians who took part in English’s 1994 show Tantamount Esperance, giving a virtuoso display of magic tricks and exquisite illusions whilst English, playing Tantamount himself, a once famed prestidigitator, now a flawed and tragic character, mused stage front about the nature of the soul. Magical encounters may happen, it seems, both on and off the stage. But magic-which dictionary definitions agree must involve an attempt to influence events, objects, or persons by supernatural power-is not illusion-
which they define merely as a deceptive appearance, or anything that gives a false impression to the senses-and the creation of theatrical magic, although it may make use of it, is not the same thing as the art of the illusionist. In teasing out such subtle differences for rigorous examination over more than a decade, Rose English has created her own theatrical world. For her, the whole thesaurus is required to define her theatrical terms-wondrous, marvellous, miraculous, monstrous, prodigious, phenomenal, stupendous are only a beginning. Her deconstruction of the thaumaturgy-the wonderworking-of theatre has taken her audiences on a journey of philosophical discovery and in the process transformed this rigorous artist herself into a weaver of dreams.
