letuscallhim‘Houdini’,mayduring the course of his performance make use
of optical illusions and set designs of the kind we have already discussed. But
he may not; and he certainly doesn’t have to. Consider the following case:
Houdini is bound tightly in chains and handcuffs, standing on the edge
of a tank of water; his stage assistant kisses him goodbye (for he might
really drown) and we see him thrown into the tank; a curtain is lowered,
so that we no longer see him; a few minutes later he emerges, trium-
phant, freed from the chains. For the audience member, let us suppose, it
looks as though Houdini has somehow wriggled himself free from his
chains, using nothing but his body.^46 In fact, when the assistant kissed
him, she passed him a key in her lips which, when the curtain went
down, he used to unlock his chains. This example is not a visual illusion
like the Fraser Spiral or like the‘brick wall’. In a very general sense, of
course, things are not as they seem to be. But there is no trickobject
(the cardboard that looks like brick, the circles that look like a spiral); the
trick was in the action, the concealment, the sleight of hand.
Although we have seen reason to doubt the use of deception or false
belief as a criterion for theatrical illusion, note that Houdini’s trick–the
one that I just outlined–is connected with false belief in a different way.
Most importantly, it is not obviously belief-independent: if I know full
well that Houdini has just been given the key, then I won’t be taken in
by the illusion. I may admire his skill, but that is a different matter.
Indeed, one can work backwards and say that if the illusion has worked
on me then I probably have some false beliefs: that Houdini did not have
a key, that the kiss was innocent, and so on. This helps explain other kinds of
responses to the illusionist: when I nervously watch Houdini sawing his
assistant in half, I probably don’treally (and falsely) believe that he is
subjecting her to a horrible, violent death. Still, even if I don’t falsely
believe that she is being sawn in half, I am likely to be (falsely) believing
something else. Perhaps her legs are not where I believe them to be, and
what I believe to be her legs are the legs of a different assistant. Thus, for
both the handcuffs and the sawing tricks, if I know exactly how the trick
works then illusion will simply fail. This is not so for the Fraser Spiral.
Do wefind Houdini-type illusions at the theatre? Illusionists’shows are
themselves a type of theatre, so in one sense the answer is obviously yes.
But do wefind them in more conventional, dramatic theatre? Certainly,
on some occasions wefind exactly that: Charlotte performs some in Act III
ofThe Cherry Orchard. More generally, there are frequent examples of the
audience being made to believe that something has happened, when in
fact it has not. So it can look to the audience as if, say, one character has
slapped another, when in fact she has not. This may be less impressive, but
it is structurally equivalent to Houdini’s handcuffs illusion: the audience
really believes that something has taken place; but if they knew what was
60 From the World to the Stage