going on, the action would not necessarily have the same effect. Just as
Houdini creates tricks to convince the audience that something is hap-
pening, when in fact it is not, so actors learn and practise plenty of
methods by which they can fool their audiences; and, often enough, the
spectator who recognises such a trick sees this as a mark of poor acting,
just as the spectator at Houdini’s show may be disappointed if shefigures
out what the kiss was for. Note that to say that the stage slap may be
equivalent to Houdini’s handcuffs trick is not to say,first, that there’sno
difference between the two. There is: Houdini’s audience have come to
see him in order to be awe-struck by his illusions, whereas the stage‘slap’
is part of a dramatic performance with a different set of criteria for success
(whatever they are). Second, this is not to say, of course, that every stage
‘slap’is or ought to be trying to fool the audience into thinking that it is
real: sometimes the slap is real; other times it might be obviously fake,
for comic or for aesthetic purposes. But examples of this kind are not
particularly hard tofind and one can understand why they have been
associated with theatre.
In the case of the stage‘slap’, the actors behave in such a way that the
audience thinks that something has taken place when, in fact, it hasn’t.
One can, of course, imagine an equivalent false belief, which doesn’texactly
relate to an action. Recall the young Krull, who believed that Müller-Rosé,
the actor, had chestnut hair. Krull visits Müller-Rosé not because he likes
chestnut hair, but because he is so impressed by Müller-Rosé’s personality.
Müller-Rosé is loved by the audience, male and female, and he receives
rapturous applause–applause directed at him, not at his character (even if it
is in virtue of his character). It is not merely Müller-Rosé’s hair colour, then,
that turns out to be illusory. Müller-Rosé’s‘dashingness’, his heart-stealing
prowess turns out to be a product of the stage, of lighting, make-up and
distance. The contrast between Müller-Rosé’s attractiveness on stage and his
unattractiveness in the dressing room is what particularly fascinates Krull:
Müller-Rosé is the repulsive little worm, who, each night, is transformed
into a butterfly by the tricks of the stage.
To reiterate: Krull has not mistaken the character (as a whole) for the
actor. He doesn’t think that Müller-Rosé is the attaché (whose character
he was playing). But just as it isn’t possible to tell (as a spectator) whether
Müller-Rosé’s hair is his real hair, so, from watching the whole perfor-
mance, it isn’t possible to tell whether Müller-Rosé’s charm is a function
of the stage or a function of the actor (or both). Of course, this needn’t
just apply to charm: one might imagine getting a false impression of how
frail an actor is. The person who asks, after a performance,‘do you think the
actor really is so frail?’, has not misunderstood the nature of theatre. Indeed,
she has recognised that theatre tends to present actors in such a way that
they (i.e. the actors) seem to be what they are not. As with the Houdini
Truth and illusion 61