WHAT’S real, what’s fake? What’s the difference between illusion and deception? And do you risk losing your true self if you constantly pretend to be what you aren’t? Those are the profound questions that the composer Raymond Yiu and the librettist Lee Warren seem to want to address in this eccentric and mildly diverting music-theatre piece, premiered at the Aldeburgh Festival. But their chosen medium is, on the surface, far from profound.
The Original Chinese Conjuror is presented as a vaudeville show in the pavilion of a seaside pier. Yiu’s music — scored for a small band with prominent accordion and lots of tinkling percussion — is largely a pastiche of music-hall songs, reminiscent in its surreal breeziness of what Maxwell Davies did to Sandy Wilson’s The Boyfriend 30 years ago.
The story also evokes vaudeville’s glory days. It recounts the tragic career of William Robinson, an ingenious but uncharismatic conjuror who reinvents himself as a Chinaman called Chung Ling Soo and wins huge fame, much to the annoyance of a real Chinese conjuror called Ching Ling Foo.In the process, however, Robinson loses his grasp on reality (whatever that is), and becomes obsessed with a dangerous stunt called the Bullet Catch, in which a gun is fired at the conjuror who apparently catches the bullet with his teeth.
Unsurprisingly, Robinson is killed on stage when it goes horribly wrong.
It’s an intriguing enough story, yet this hour-long show doesn’t quite stack up. Neither text nor music is sharp enough to bring out the layers of meaning that the authors clearly hope to convey.
Advertisement
The shadow of Sondheim hangs heavily over some numbers. And the portrayal of Robinson’s real-life Chinese assistant, Chai Ping, by a virtuoso counter-tenor (Andrew Watts), singing very high and very loud, is not only aurally uncomfortable in a confined space, but also pointlessly incongruous in the context of a cast that otherwise comprises conventional West End actor-singers.
Still, the five performers work hard to tell the tale through a series of sketches. The tricks — disappearing handkerchiefs, disembodied heads, self-propelling chest — are pulled off with flair and technical finesse. Martin Duncan’s direction and Francis O’Connor’s designs display exemplary resourcefulness on a tiny stage, and Tim Redmond’s musical direction is cogent and zippy.
There are further performances this weekend in Southwold, then in July at the Almeida Theatre in London.