Review-Bullet Catch-Hong Kong Arts Festival
7-3-14
By: Tom Hope
It may not be a truth universally acknowledged but it’s one which I myself advocate: that a core function of drama is to allow each onlooker, cocooned in the security of the theatre, to suspend not only their disbelief but also the current cares of their day-to-day lives so they can instead share the more intensely in the jeopardy of those on stage, imagining how they themselves might cope if presented in real life with those same dilemmas.
Bullet Catch takes this one step beyond by inviting an audience member on to the stage to place the only other ‘actor’ (writer/director/performer Rob Drummond) in peril - in this instance by firing the gun by which magician William Wonder re-enacts the bullet catch stunt which (we’re told) backfired tragically 100 years ago, dispatching William Henderson (Victorian illusionist, existential nihilist and friend of Harry Houdini) to an untimely onstage death. Will the same fate befall our very own William, we wonder – and would we pull that same trigger were we that same audience volunteer?
It’s a very accomplished show. Rob Drummond is instantly likeable, rapidly building a rapport with the audience as he calls for volunteers (‘everyone put your hands up, please’) then selecting ‘the one’ by a process which overlays luck of the lottery with a veneer of psychological analysis. He is also engagingly philosophical in then building the relationship and complicity on which his show depends, with us as much as with his volunteer, teasing us with questions and insights on the nature of our existence, of our free will, of the truth of what we are witnessing: whether we really want to know what is really happening or whether we might be the happier for being less curious and so more content with the magic that seemingly surrounds even the most rational of existences...
Our volunteer last night was Vincent, a recently retired aircraft engineer whose wife Louisa watched with us from the stalls. We learned a little of their lives and a lot about Vincent’s character as he became the subject of and accomplice to a succession of mind-readings and other stunts, including one with a broken bottle-neck which had the man next to me (and a whole lot of others besides) breath-bated in expectation of severed arteries if not limbs.
As Drummond/Wonder put himself seemingly the more at risk, we (through Vincent) became the more conscious of how our trust could be exploited, reminiscent of the Milgram experiments of the 1950s and the spectre of mass connivance in war crimes which they conjectured. Vincent was reminded repeatedly that he could withdraw at any time - as were we – and, when the climactic moment of ‘bullet catch’ arrived, one lady did remove herself, presumably not wanting to risk witnessing the fatally unpalatable. Luckily for us, Vincent did not. (Apparently this has in the past happened, at which point the show concluded and the audience left in distempered disbelief.)
Luckily too, Mr Drummond/Wonder did not die before us, rising instead with the bullet gleaming in his teeth to take his final bows and read from the letters of David Gaunt, Vincent’s not so fortunate predecessor, asking how William Henderson could have done what he did in making poor innocent trusting David the victimising victim of cruelly calculated chance…
That’s the trick that turns this particular show into something extra-special: the conjuring up (with the aid of the audience’s own improvised interventions) of an earlier time and place in which something happened which went beyond the unexpected – and, in so doing, challenges us to ask what we might do to make our own lives more meaningful in both guarding against and surrendering to such manipulations.
For myself, I was lucky enough to meet Vincent and Luisa – by chance – in the foyer after the show and learn from him how he felt his mind was genuinely being read on stage – and how they really are who they declared themselves to us: a Hong Kong Chinese couple treating themselves to a night at the theatre, with a reassuringly calm and collected manner, perfect ambassadors for our collective complicity.
I was also reassured that an audience at least half-full of ethnic Chinese could seem to enjoy so much a show which was – untypically for the HKAF but, given the show's inherently improvised nature, unsurprisingly – unsurtitled. There were moments when I wondered if Mr Drummond/Wonder had bitten off more than he could conjure with in reading their ideograph-oriented minds. Despite his fluent and soft spoken delivery of Scottish-brogued patter, at no point did I fear the same for non-native English speakers in the audience. The lady who left before the bullet catch was Caucasian – and maybe she had a ferry to catch – or needed a toilet (the show is 75 minutes without interval) - or was a plant – but it was not because she was bored from watching something she could not comprehend: of that I am certain – or, at any rate, as certain as I can dare to be in such conjurious circumstances.
Bullet Catch is playing at the Cultural Center through March 8th. For more information, click here.
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