Staging Life Stories

Abstract

Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn’s recent book Neo-Victorianism uses the Christopher Nolan film The Prestige (based on the novel by Christopher Priest) to superb effect in the chapter ‘Doing It with Mirrors’, discussing it alongside Neil Burger’s The Illusionist and a clutch of neo-Victorian novels.¹ Their use of the three-part trick, highlighted in the film, as a framework for a neo-Victorian return is one to which I am indebted in this chapter. However, as the process I will be describing takes place in a theatre, the connection with Victorian stage magic becomes less of a striking metaphor in the present study and more a way of attempting to account for the uncanny audience experience of stage impersonation. Where Heilmann and Llewellyn’s neo-Victorian novelists depart from stage magic by allowing the reader ‘insight into how the illusion is produced’, the biodrama genre that I will be discussing is already in many ways an anti-illusionist style of modern theatre, with stripped-down staging, direct address to the audience and occasionally the actor stepping out of role.² Nevertheless, biodrama’s convention of making the dead speak to a modern audience offers a ‘double vision’ where the interaction between actor and role becomes an important part of apprehending and historicizing the performance event.³