The Dying Art of Magic

Stage magic, though secularized and theatrical, retains a link to mystical and shamanic practices by playing with the boundary between life and death. The essay examines UK magician Tommy Cooper's uncanny onstage death during a live television broadcast in 1984, analyzing his variety act for echoes of a mystical ceremony and the possibility of journeying to the afterlife. It also considers Penn & Teller's nail gun stunt, which the magicians reveal as a sham, fostering critical spectatorship that can be read as a form of lucid dreaming. Their antics dissolve the performance and the audience's attachment to reality, aligning with mystics and sages. The instability between life and death, theatre and reality, opens a different understanding of magic as precariously positioned between trickery and conjuring other worlds.

Study at a glance

Abstract

The act of dying can be seen as somewhat ‘irreal’, as Maurice Blanchot wrote, especially so when it occurs in the context of a magic show. In different ways, the performance of magic plays with the levels of reality of theatre itself, whilst at times conjuring the possibility of an afterlife, and communing with the dead. The essay explores the question of theatre and dying by examining UK magician’s Tommy Cooper’s uncanny stage death on live television in 1984, and a seemingly death-defying stunt by Vegas magicians Penn & Teller, featuring a loaded nail gun. Tommy Cooper’s variety act is analysed for its incongruous echoes of a mystical ceremony, and the possibility of journeying to the other side of life: what is proposed is that, however secularized, theatricalized and aestheticized, stage magic retains a link to the mysteries plumbed by mystics and shamanic practitioners. Penn & Teller’s nail gun act is revealed by the magicians themselves to be a sham, producing a kind of ‘critical spectatorship’ (Karen Beckman); yet this familiar sceptical stance can also be read as a form of lucid dreaming: Penn & Teller’s stage antics ultimately dissolve the performance itself, as well as the audience’s attachment to anything deemed ‘real’, thereby aligning themselves with mystics and sages.Ultimately, the essay examines how the instability of the divide between life and death, theatre and ‘reality’, opens up a different way of understanding the art of magic. The magician’s performance is seen to be precariously positioned between two poles: on one hand, the openly acknowledged trickery and deception for entertainment purposes; on the other, the conjuring of other realities and cosmologies, returning us to the possibility of journeying between worlds, and powerfully reminding us of life itself as illusion.