World premiere in Chichester

REVIEW: Magic by David Haig, directed by Lucy Bailey, Chichester Festival Theatre, until Saturday, May 16.

The late great astronomer Sir Patrick Moore, who lived for so many years just down the road in Selsey, was famously and understandably indignant whenever anyone called him an astrologer.

Astrology, he always used to say, proves one thing and one thing only: that there is one born every minute.

Does Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with his spiritualism fall into precisely that category in David Haig’s consistently intriguing new play Magic?

Haig, himself playing Sir Arthur, gives us a man who confides that his greatest ever happiness was just that afternoon when during a seance he conversed with his beloved son who had been shot dead during the Great War. Sir Arthur says his own happiness was that his own son was evidently so blissfully happy himself in the afterlife.

Are we really watching a beautiful moment of fulfilment here? Or simply a tragic, grieving father cynically and cruelly exploited by the charlatans?

The great Harry Houdini, Sir Arthur’s unlikely “sparring partner”, is utterly convinced it’s the latter, and the play moves slowly but surely to an explosive confrontation between the two.

Houdini, played brilliantly by Hadley Fraser in a part which initially seems underwritten before growing strongly, is, he says, a man desperate to believe in an afterlife, still deeply grieving his late mother. His problem is that as an illusionist he knows all the illusions.

Meanwhile Sir Arthur, having created the world’s most rational detective, now advocates for belief in the afterlife as something incontrovertibly and provably true. In his earnest hopefulness, Haig is superb. The clash between the two, when it comes, is brilliantly done.

But maybe just as interesting is Sir Arthur’s wife Jean (Claire Price) who is convinced that the next world has designated her a particularly gifted receiver of messages. You could argue endlessly her sincerity… or her delusion. Or maybe even her loving kindness.

The play starts maybe just a touch slowly with a boxing scene which could probably be cut just a little. Elsewhere musical interludes interrupt rather than enhance. And at the start of the second half there are a couple of minutes of absolutely nothing happening very busily but rather pointlessly. These are distractions in a piece which cries out for a tighter, tauter handling.

In fact, the Minerva with its closer focus might well have been the better venue for the piece. But it is still a deeply intriguing, provocative and hugely poignant evening – a worthy successor to Haig’s Pressure, in which he also starred in Chichester twelve years ago.