Preview: The Infamous Brothers Davenport

Published on Tuesday 24 January 2012 02:07

A new show imagines the backstage lives of two brothers who were a sensation at the height of the 19th-century spiritualism craze. By Tim Cornwell

In VICTORIAN Britain, a performance by Willie and Ira Davenport was enough to start a riot. It happened in Hull, in the 1860s, when the American brothers performed the spiritualist stunt which became their trademark. The brothers invited members of the audience to tie them up with ropes, fastened inside a “spirit cabinet” that also contained musical instruments. When the trick worked, the spirits of the dead were said to visit, playing on the flute, trumpet, or tambourine; sometimes a hand would stick out, or instruments would even be flung into the audience, hitting people. The doors were opened to reveal the brothers still tied inside.

In the pre-television age, at a time when spiritualism was still a novelty, it was a performance that could be drawn out slowly, over three quarters of an hour. But in Hull, when the trick failed – as it could when members of the audience knew their knots – the audience smashed up the stage.

“Sometimes they weren’t able to get out of the rope, so things got out of hand,” says Peter Lamont, a historian of magic and the paranormal and lecturer at Edinburgh University. “On more than one occasion the audience rioted and smashed up the cabinet.”

The Infamous Brothers Davenport, which opens at Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre tonight, was singled out early as one to watch among the theatrical offerings of 2012. It certainly has all the ingredients. It’s by Vox Motus, a company with a strong track record in high theatricality, physical theatre and comic wit. The script is by Peter Arnott, whose resumé includes The Breathing House, a Lyceum premiere that won the Theatrical Management Association’s Best Play Award in 2003. The music, written and performed by harpist and pianist Phamie Gow, also dangles a likely treat. She’s fronted for Seamus Heaney, performed with Philip Glass and for the Dalai Lama, to name a few gigs.

Then there’s the subject matter: that Victorian fascination, which has waxed and waned but never, ever died – spiritualism, fakery, and magic, with tricks so good that we’re still not certain where conjuring ends and a bit of the supernatural takes over.

“The Davenports then are what Derren Brown is now,” says Vox Motus co-director Jamie Harrison. “Then the zeitgeist was spiritualism; now it’s psychology.” Brown has tapped into that zeitgeist, Harrison says: he tempts us with the idea that he has psychological powers which transcend trickery into real magic, we are drawn, irresistibly, to unravel the mystery of the moment.

The Lyceum show invites the audience to imagine they are entering the theatre in 1862, to see the Davenport Brothers live on stage. It recreates the spirit cabinet, and adds a fictional backstory about the brothers’ backstage lives. Beyond that, neither Harrison nor his co-director Candice Edmunds are giving much away.

Ira Erastus Davenport (1839–1911) and William Henry Davenport (1841–1877) were the sons of a policeman from Buffalo, New York. They began performing in 1854, in their mid-teens, managed by their father.

They emerged soon after the Fox sisters, also from the US, who started the practice of “communicating with spirits” through table rapping. In the still early days of spiritualism, with audiences in darkened and dimly lit theatres, the Davenports persuaded the credulous that spirits could do much more than knock. The brothers travelled to Britain, and became a sensation.

Things could turn violent and painful before the riots. “A guitar flew out of the cabinet, dashing members of the audience across the head. There were reports of broken legs and wrists,” says Harrison. There were stories of theatre managers being “roughed up” by spirits and even having their takings pinched.

The brothers’ biographies were largely publicity material, making outrageous claims. This has given Arnott and Vox Motus freedom to come up with their own. “It’s a story about two brothers struggling against really horrific circumstances,” says Harrison. “It’s not a magic show, it’s a play.”

In a cast of five, the Davenports are played by Ryan and Scott Fletcher, both with formidable CVs that include separate stints in the National Theatre of Scotland’s Black Watch.

“It’s lovely having brothers playing brothers,” says Edmunds. “There’s a language between them that brothers can understand.”

Harrison has a sound grounding in magic. Fascinated by it as a boy, he was talent-spotted during a hospital show and ended up on television, touring America and Asia in his late teens. After a string of shows for hotel chains and companies, he realised he was more interested in storytelling. He returned to drama school, still using magic to pay the bills.

Researching the production, he says, “we were surprised how many people actually still believe that there is life after death in a spiritualism context. I have had conversations with people recently who are spiritualists, who are coming to see what we are doing.” Its curiosity value has also drawn Lamont, who works at the Koestler Parapsychology unit at Edinburgh University, and the author and debunker Richard Wiseman, with whom he often appears.

The Fletchers joke that the spirit cabinet is like “a torture chamber for actors” stuck in a box with a sibling for hours, but have a brotherly chemistry onstage. The show features rapid-fire scene, costume, and character changes between illusions. It has had extra rehearsal time to ensure that the Fletchers, practically speaking, can pull off the Davenports’ tricks. They’ve suffered rope burns in over 70 hours of practice on the stunt.

“These guys performed this routine for years, and years, and years,” says Harrison. “We’ve got a few weeks.”

• The Infamous Brothers Davenport is at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, tonight until 11 February. www.lyceum.org.uk

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