Houdini’s Suitcase

presented by Pickled Image
(a co-production with Nordland Visual Theatre)
Friday 7 & Saturday 8 September 2007
The Dukes, Lancaster

If you’ve got suitcases in your loft that you’re reluctant, yet tempted, to open, then you’ll appreciate Houdini’s Suitcase. Directed by Emma Lloyd, this production is not just about getting out of a locked trunk or suitcase (or enclosed water tank), although those elements are there, it is also about what really is in those trunks and suitcases: the material things with their associated memories and senses.

This familiar but effective metaphor is partnered with another: the train journey. The suitcases are piled up on a station platform where an old man is waiting, and where he relives the journey of his life – though not chronologically, which means this production is full of surprises. At the end he leaves with the train, after finally escaping the chained trunk … each to their own interpretation here.

A third metaphor is the circus, part of the old man’s memories, where the ringmaster reminds us of life’s ups and downs, pleasures and pain, sadnesses and frustrations.

Much of Houdini’s Suitcase is dark - the lover who dies of tuberculosis, the (under)performing bear who is cowed and then shot, the post-war dream of flying that ends in a nightmare of being shot down – but some of the darkness is comic. If you discover the rabbit you used to produce from a hat in an old suitcase, that rabbit will be a skeleton, right? Right! And not all the comedy is dark: a very sensuous pair of hands caress each other and delicately remove their pink satin gloves before almost drawing the old man back into the suitcase with them.

This production can be pinned down to neither mime nor puppetry. The ringmaster speaks but the old man mostly whispers to himself – until the end. The puppets vary in dimension – the bear is life-size, the ringmaster, Mr Pain (who has the audience squirming) and the WWI solider come out of suitcases, and two tiny earlier incarnations of the old man, the recovering soldier and the voyeur, are meticulously ‘worked’ by him. The result is both magical and mystifying, as are dreams and memories. It is a shock to realise, at the end, that there were only two ‘human’ performers, Victoria Andrews and Dik Downey: such precision and nimbleness is impressive.

The music (composed by Simon Preston) is crucial to this production. While the old man is looking at his photos, we know what he is looking at by the music we are listening to. When he is replaying dance music in his mind, the music gets louder at precisely the moment he opens the suitcase with his dead lover’s dress in. (After dancing with her, when he folds the dress away again, there is an unmistakeable smell of mothballs.)

Houdini’s Suitcase moves the boundaries of what most theatrical productions are like. As such, it is likely to go beyond your expectations as well as treating your senses and challenging you to explore its metaphors. The minimum recommended age for the audience is 12, which is probably right, but what an opportunity for a 12-year-old to learn that theatre isn’t about being told things by someone else. Lancaster has been very fortunate to have had this production.

7/9/07 Jane Sunderland

Next performance: Dukes Theatre, Sat 8 Sep, 7.30pm (but check the web for shows elsewhere)
Tickets £8.00 (concessions £6.00)
(Pickled Image is a Bristol based Puppet Company who have been performing, making, teaching and filming puppets since they formed in the year 2000.)