nobody does so once the curtain goes down.^60 Indeed, Rousseau at one
point complains that whatever beneficial moral effect is produced by
theatre (if indeed there be any)‘lasts no longer than the illusion which
produced it’.^61 In the Prologue toWallenstein, Schiller asks the audience
to be thankful that the muse, although she does‘create illusion’, goes on
‘in honesty’to‘Reveal the trick she plays, and not pretend/ That what she
brings us is the stuff of truth’.^62 Even if the spell does produce moments
of false belief, the fact that these come to an end with the performance
suggests that Schiller is right to call the illusion an honest one.
Although they are different, the types of illusion that we’ve discussed
may have an impact upon each other. Clearly, there are occasions when
the visual and Houdini-type illusions go wrong and the mistake breaks
the spell: if, say, a part of the set collapses; if we see the fake blood cap-
sule before it explodes; if an actor is really hurt in a stagefight. But this
is by no means the only way that these kinds of illusions may be related.
Indeed, one might think that complicated but highly impressive Houdini
illusions could also have the effect of breaking the spell–namely, if the
audience is thinking‘how on earth did they do that?’instead of being
engrossed in the play. In a recent production ofDanton’s Death, Danton
was guillotined in such a realistic way that all the audience could think
about was how such a stunt was performed. The distinction between
different types of illusion can also help us to be clearer about which kinds
of illusions we are referring to when we talk about theatre and illusion.
Brecht, for example, is often considered to be ‘anti-illusion’ when it
comes to the theatre: we look at his ideas in more detail in Chapter 7. In
that chapter, I cite a description of a Brecht performance, in which what
looks like a solid marble proscenium arch turns out, with a change of
lighting, to be made of a transparent gauze. The effect is supposed, in
part, to prevent the spectators from falling under what I’m calling the
‘spell’; but note that Brecht is happy to use an illusion of one kind (the
gauze that appears to be marble) in order to undermine an illusion of
another kind (the spell).
The term‘theatrical illusion’evidently does not refer to one phenom-
enon. We have found a number of different kinds of illusion that often do
play a part in a theatrical performance. Sometimes this is clear to the
spectator; sometimes not. Although being deceived is not a necessary
condition for illusion, spectators can be and frequently are deceived by
theatre.
Nietzsche: illusion as truth?
Our treatment of theatre and illusion has thus far been an investigation of
which types of illusions there may be at a theatrical performance. Some,
66 From the World to the Stage