| |
The Show
The show is accompanyied with a rather funny red covered book
on the history of the Marxist Magicians written by Yves Superb, Illusionist
De Jour
The Communist Manifesto boldy states ‘The history of all hitherto
existing society is the history of class struggles’. This is a fact:
Karl Marx said so. But how has the class struggle been affected through
the years by the efforts of brave Marxist Magicians? For the answer, read
on..
The Dormer Twins (Stan and Stern, pictured) are regarded as the first
Marxist Magicians. They appeared far down on a handful of variety bills
around 1927 with an act described as ‘surreal and socialist’.
No record remains of their act other than a vague feeling of agitational
discomfort.
The proletarian-magical cause surged further forward during the Great
Depression with Wilbur Watchit, an early evening turn on the short-lived
People’s Playhouse circuit (an ad-hoc theatrical collective striving
under the motto ‘Who needs a theatre when we’ve got a dustbin?’)
Watchit’s act was reviewed in the Communist Party newsletter The
Left-Leaner as ‘A return to objective realist magic which—’.
Who knows what the rest might have said?
The Party’s rally at Shoreditch Town Hall (pictured) on the evening
of the Battle of Cable Street (4 October 1936) was attended by thousands.
But it ended disastrously for fourth-on-the-bill Marxist Magician Harrini
Transcendo when a convener mistook him for one of Moseley’s blackshirts
and ejected him explicitly. Later, in Hoxton Square, he was tilted. Transcendo
retired bitter and resentful from the profession soon after.
World War II, that great fight against monopoly capitalism, yielded
no advances in the development of Marxist magic. But in the early 1950s
a group of Marxist Magicians congregated regularly at The Cedars public
house in Clapham to debate, argue, swap tricks and agitate fellow customers.
They included Laurence DeMystery, Clarence of Lewisham and Oronco the
Square Ballist. Together they worked to perfect a form of magic that would,
in DeMystery’s words, ‘express the inner turmoil of the working
man-magician in a form unlike all others, an abstract magic that nevertheless
connects the proletarian struggle to the crazy horrors of this new atom
age.’
Bookings were few and far between, but many of the group’s performances
nevertheless became legendary—such as Kleinwort Benson’s trick
The Disturbance of Seven Boxes, which he followed with Osso Grosso and
an audience-participation variant on My Eyes! My Eyes! Clearly none of
these tricks are from related magical canons (Osso Grosso being a classic
southern European remove/reveal, while the Seven Boxes is strictly of
the Morden Station or ‘run for it’ school) but it was precisely
this violent juxtaposition the magicians were aiming for. ‘We believed
that the socialistic necessity would only be served once the factory worker
received sufficient dialectical trick-making directly, in a sense, onto
the central cortex of the eye-brain-mind’ Oronco told Tired Campaigner
magazine in 1974. Audiences scratched their heads, and the majority of
the group retired bitter and resentful from the profession soon after.
With each generation the Marxist cause is revivified by brave young
comrades willing to get their hands dirty before they have smelled what
is in the box, and in magic the same applies. Thus the early 1960s saw
a reaction to the more dour ‘abstract kitchen Marxists’ in
the form of a new engagement with the burgeoning consumer economy.
A ‘hip, new’ clique of Marxist performers in their early
twenties entertained in pubs, works canteens, clubs and small revue theatres.
Though each artist’s stage persona was typically individual and
‘new’ (Alasko the Risky styling himself in furs, Julian Entabulature
coming on to a drum-roll and a tap dance) they each performed the same
one trick. ‘All any of us did was the straightforward Denby Brake,’
recalled Teddy Whisper in Action For Change NOW Newsletter in 1984. ‘We’d
go on and present a member of the audience with some nice thing like a
transistor radio or a travelling alarm clock. Then we’d whip it
back, cover it with a silk handkerchief, smash it with a hammer and do
a big reveal on the item all broken up to buggery. Then we’d say,
“And that, comrades, is what capitalism is doing to you”.
It certainly got a reaction!’
This was the group of Marxist Magicians that came closest to being embraced
by the mainstream when, waiting in the green room of That Was The Week
That Was, Ken Believable was punched in the eye by Bernard Levin (pictured).
Believable subsequently refused to appear on the show and retired bitter
and resentful from the profession soon after.
Clearly the events of the late 1960s left the world’s youth hungry
for change, and so it was not uncommon to see Marxist Magicians appearing
on the bills of pop concerts and blues-ins (for example Den ‘Mover’
Fortune at the 1969 Melksham Jazz Festival alongside The Pink Floyd, Ken
Dodd, Lionel Streeter’s Mime Caravan and Gilbert & George.)
Influenced by a Maoist brand of French Marxism, the new magicians of the
early 1970s stunned audiences by deconstructing their acts as they performed,
haranguing the crowds if they failed to applaud—and haranguing them
if they did. Perhaps the lowest point in proletraian engagement came in
1974 when Sebastian Suburbian told the audience of Aladdin at the Bristol
Old Vic (with John Inman (pictured) giving his Twankey) ‘This magic
wand has no intrinsic transformative powers! All magic is a con! We must
rebuild society from zero—lock all the doors!’.
Worse still was confrontational magician Lee Fuck’s 1975 appearance
upstairs at the Red Lion on London’s Great Windmill Street. Surrounded
by black-clad heavies carrying machine guns and in front of a banner proclaiming
‘NO MAGIC’ Fuck attempted to burn the pub, once a regular
haunt of Karl Marx himself, to the ground using a copy of Capital and
a blowtorch. Thankfully the edition, published by an offshoot of a splinter
group of the Communist Party’s Edmonton branch, was printed on such
poor quality paper that it failed to ignite, and Fuck retired bitter and
resentful from the profession soon after.
The early 1980s were of course a period that saw the ascendency of two
huge bugbears of the Marxist Magicians, Thatcher and Daniels (pictured).
The brash populism both figures used and encouraged meant the more ‘conceptual’
magic of the likes of Trevor ‘Deep Space’ Haarlem went out
of favour, and in its place came the epic illusionism of Roland Nowhere
and Pettifer the Disappearing. Performing under disco lights and to a
pounding pop-rock soundtrack these larger-than-life Marxists put the showbiz
back into revolutionary proletarian agitation. In 1984 Keith Fantabulo
told The Stage ‘In my act I want to get people laughing, dancing,
clapping and thinking. Thinking “how does he make that tiger disappear”
yes, but also thinking “are the proposed measures on financial deregulation
in the City really beneficial to the working class” too.’
Fantabulo was sadly mauled by one of his tigers while on a tour of doss-houses,
and what was left of him retired bitter and resentful from the profession
soon after.
The ‘variety curator’ is of course a job that we now find
merely laughable, but back in the early 1990s Marxist Magicians were unable
to get even a bottle-washing job in a venue unless they ingratiated themselves
with one of these entertainment magnates. Figures such as Klim Tromso
(SWE), Etta Flennt (GER), Dolorio Ferrulio (ITA) and Havering North (NOC)
put together line-ups of disparate magic acts in showy venues around the
world, acts which seemingly had no relation to each other apart from in
the recesses of the organiser’s mind.
Yves Superb, Illusionist Du Jour (pictured), recalls an event in Kuala
Lumpur where he shared top billing with the American religious fundamentalist
magician Dick Van God: ‘It wasn’t so much a “meeting
of minds” as a scramble for the microphone for each to denounce
the other’s beliefs. Mind you, maybe that’s what the curator
intended. I don’t know, and to this day my expenses haven’t
been paid.’ Superb’s contribution was to ask the audience
to question the economic and societal role of third world hairpiece manufacturing
workers. Van God retired bitter and resentful—but excellently upholstered—from
his profession soon after.
The past is over. It has served its purpose and must be forgotten, or
preferably incinerated. The present day sees a new group of Marxist Magicians
striking out successfully as a force for change in a teetering capitalist
system that stands on a knife-edge at the precipice overlooking the abyss.
Clearly there has never been a greater need for the confluence of prestidigitation
and the thoughts of Karl Marx (1818-1883).
As Kumanalia the Numismatic, leader of the Magicians (pictured here
in conversation with Karl Marx), says, ‘We are desperate for bookings—not
because we need money for props or strong drink, but because there has
never been a greater need for the confluence of prestidigitation and the
thoughts of Karl Marx (1818-1883)’.So, what next for the Marxist
Magicians? Clearly the revolutionary struggle continues, and leading figures
such as Lord Bellentine (Peer of the Incomprehensible) suggest globalisation
and environmental catastrophe mean Magicians must travel wherever the
need for magic is greatest, such as the south of France, Italy, or basically
anywhere around the Mediterranean.
Lenin asked, ‘What is to be done?’ The Marxist Magicians
answer, ‘BOOK THE MARXIST MAGICIANS NOW!'
Suggested Reading
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Oxford University
Press
Francis Wheen, Karl Marx, 4th Estate, London
Suggested Listening
In Our Time, Melyvn Bragg's regular Thursday morning programme
on Radio 4, ran a poll in 2005 of listeners' favourite philosophers.
Marx received the most votes and as a result an episode was dedicated
to him, with contributions from Anthony Grayling, Francis Wheen
and Gareth Stedman Jones. Here
is a link to the programme's website where you can read more and listen
to that particular broadcast.
|
|
|
|
