Houdini Speaks To The Living – The Space On The Mile
Hidden Room Theatre produce this show from writer-director Beth Burns and writer-magician Patrick Terry, who also stars as Houdini, along with Robert Matney playing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Houdini was famously a debunker of fraudulent mediums, while Conan Doyle, perhaps counterintuitively as the creator of the very rational Sherlock Holmes, was a crusading spiritualist. That the two men were real-life friends feeds the dramatic tension that has fascinated many for a century and is the centre of this show.
The level of research is clear, with lines taken verbatim from the letters and works of Houdini and Conan Doyle. Terry & Matney first originated these roles a decade ago, and their ease in these parts is clear, though Terry's theatricality, while reasonable for a performer c...