The Spirit box

.. The infamous brothers davenport and their spectacular stage seance

Preview night of a dark tale from Vox Motus, that re-animates the past as much as the dead, through the medium of mediums, spirit boxes, floating objects and other such spiritual manifestations of the great beyond. Pretty good stuff. Particularly the pairing of psychological and paranormal disturbance.

Each flashback is retold from within the "spirit box". Somehow they manage to re-prop and strike whole sets in and out of the thing. A country shack, a crowded bar, bunk beds, a cemetery, a tree.. incredible staging.

I like the quotation listed in the program from William Bolitho's Twelve Against The Gods published in 1932

"The spirit of the Age, since it was the Age of Reason, was that of Mystery. For it cannot be disguised that the prime effect of knowledge of the universe in whoch we are all shipwrecked is a feeling of despair and disgust, often developing into an energetic desire to escape out of reality altogether. The Age of Voltaire is also the age of fairy tales. Indeed, the beginning of all folklore should be dated to the time when primitive man had lost his brightest illusions.

This escape, since from the Truth, can only be into illusion, the sublime comfort and refuge of that most pragmatic fiction.

The shortest way out of Manchester is a bottle of Gordon's Gin; out of any businessman's life there is the mirage of Paris; out of Paris, out the mediocrity of talent and imagination, there are all the drugs, from subtle, all conquering opium, to cheating, cozening cocaine. There is religion, of course, and music and gambling; these are the major euphorias.

But the queerest and the oldest is the side path of Magic... Magic.. which at its deepest is concerned with the creative powers of the will; at lowest it is but a barbarous rationalism, the first of all human attempts to force the heavens to be reasonable. But even in the political branch, or spell-binding, the magician must believe in himself, even if it is only for as long as he is spouting"

P.S. if you get there early you could be in with a shout at getting dolled up in Victorian garb and asked on stage as a witness, or to write messages to the dead