With The Exorcist stage show running in London’s West End this winter we caught up with its illusionist Ben Hart and tried to find out how you can levitate beds, spin heads and scare the bejeezus out of the theatre-going public, all on a nightly basis.

 

When we speak, Ben and his creative team are still in previews, meaning that they’re refining the effects and working on the transition to a new team that will manage the effects for the remainder of the five-month run. We catch him on the Phoenix Theatre’s grand staircase as demonic whispers fill the main auditorium. He regularly creates illusions for stage, movies and TV, and is a member of the Inner Magic Circle with Gold Star.

Ben, your role is in many ways a thankless one because there’s not a lot you can say about what you do.

It’s very hard because a lot of people just see me as vey evasive, not realising that it’s part of the job. While I’d love more than anything to tell everyone about all the work that goes on behind the scenes, it has to be kept secret. It’s a strange job, because I’m having to accept that an awful lot of my work isn’t going to be appreciated in its entirety. The audience will only see the tip of the iceberg… and that’s great. I love that. It’s frustrating when I tell my friends that I’ve had an exhausting day at work, but can’t tell them why.

How would you describe the nature of the effects in this show? Are they predominantly physical, digital?

We’ve got a really interesting combination of lighting, physical effects, video and sound. When you say The Exorcist to people they ask you why there hasn’t been a stage production before – the movie came out in 1973. The reason is that it wouldn’t have been possible before now. We’re right at the forefront of technology in theatre, but because this is set in a domestic situation we’re not rubbing the effects in people’s faces in the way that other plays might. Here we want the technology to be invisible, whilst still being an incredibly technologically-advanced show. I bring a Victorian special effects element in the way that the magicians of that time were fascinated with ghosts and showing them on stage. I really do believe that the audience won’t realise we’re using technology a lot of the time.

When I recently saw Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, it struck me that a great challenge in the theatre for stage illusions is the huge range of angles that the tricks need to work at. Is this also true here?

Massively, yes. And in a conventional magic show you can present the trick any way you want, the prop can look whatever you want it to look like; you can build your compromises into the actual magic trick. But with a play like this the actors need to look like actors and the set needs to look like the set… and the lighting needs to look like it fits within the realm of the show. That’s hard. You need to have a total approach to it and be aware of every single detail so that the effects are set up within the plot. That means liaising with the playwright and saying, ‘Actually, if you could put that a bit later in the scene it would really help me out.’ If I know that particular lighting is going to be needed then I need to let the lighting people know as early as possible.

Does it help that because there’s no interval the audience’s tension is not dissipated?

It has taken us a few shows to be able to manage the pace backstage. As the creative team slowly hand over the process to the team that will manage the show on a daily basis we’ve been facing the challenge that it’s all so fast, with so many scenes. It’s great that we don’t have an interval and I hope it stays that way – it makes it more cinematic. Saying that, there’s still a distinct marker. It’s pretty clear when you reach the crest and the ebb and flow builds up again towards the ending.

Was it very clear from the outset that the spinning head and levitating bed were a given?

There was a bit of negotiation. We knew that we were presenting a version of the story, not necessarily the film, although the book is written by William Peter Blatty, who also wrote the screenplay. We knew that we were going for a true psychological version of the story and I think we deliver on all the moments that the audience would expect. Certainly when I came on board I was very keen to tackle things like projectile vomit, levitation and a spinning head. I’m a massive horror fan, so it’s a dream gig for me.

But they are challenges?

Whilst they present extraordinary challenges, I cannot work on The Exorcist and not battle those demons myself. We’ve gone for our versions of those moments; we’re not trying to emulate the aesthetic of the film. We’ve slightly adapted things and also we’ve recognised that what works on film doesn’t always aid the narrative progression of a play.

For example, while we do see Regan’s physical decay, that’s quite hard to see when we’re in a big room with some of the audience a long way away. It’s easy on camera because you do a close-up and show make-up. We have to do things in a bigger way and have to take a theatrical approach, taking advantage of what you can do in a theatre.

How have the audience reacted? Are they screaming at the right places?

I take so many pages of notes based on how the audience are finding it. On the one hand I take notes about the technicalities, but that’s hardly nothing compared to the notes on timing. Often I sit with my pencil on the page and I’m drawing a seismograph to measure how I think the audience is feeling during the points I’m responsible for. How do we reach maximum tension and then where do they release that tension? That’s fascinating. Because there are so many effects in the show, and certainly it’s Sean Mathias’ direction that makes them great, I have to find a way to adapt the effects to the actors who are performing them, based on their personalities and their rhythms. If you can tweak something here or there, you can get a huge result, as seen in the audience’s reaction.

So you’re effectively editing the effects live?

Exactly. The whole production is very filmic in that we go from one scene to another very quickly. Often we come into a scene mid-way through. In conventional theatre the lights go down, lights come up again on another scene and they begin their conversation. In this show the lights come up and they might be halfway through a conversation, much like a film.

If you take a classic horror scene like the shower attack in Psycho, a lot of its power is from its editing – the way that it’s cut makes us feel like we’ve seen something more extreme. I don’t have that luxury on stage, so I have to edit with what’s available. I have to create shocking images so that the audience edits in their mind. They create a montage. As a magician that’s totally doable – it’s about how you make the audience remember things in a certain way.

In addition to the misremembering and sleight-of-hand, is lighting one of your biggest friends in a show like this?

The lighting design is very important. Philip Gladwell is very skilled. It’s hard because we don’t want to fall into the cliché of horror – the flashing lights and darkness – and yet we still need them because that’s a horror shortcut, and so much of the genre is about expectations. You have to play very carefully with the clichés. You can’t reject them, but at the same time you have to elaborate on them.

You have to embrace those expectations.

Exactly! On a show like The Exorcist, which was a total game changer within the genre, these things are givens. From a technical point of view the lighting helps hide my secrets, but it’s more than that. Shadows say a lot, and brightness says a lot.

A lot of people I know tell me about some of the effects and things that they’ve seen, which I can promise you are not in the show! They’ve painted them in their own minds, and I love that. I shouldn’t be admitting this on record – I just say ‘Thank you, I worked really hard on that.’ They see things from of the corner of their eyes. They see things that didn’t happen and it’s because we’ve created that environment.

I can totally believe that. I was just sat out there in the empty theatre and Ian McKellen’s demonic voice blasted out. It’s easy to get spooked.

What an amazing voice for that role. When I got involved in this and heard talk that he would be playing the demon’s voice I thought that would be brilliant. We try not to reference the film too much in this production because we present the audience with different questions than the film does. The voice of the demon in the film is not that articulate – the voice actress [Mercedes McCambridge] used to gargle whiskey and all sorts [and regurgitate raw eggs]. Here we’ve got the most articulate and witty demon you could ever get. It brings with it questions they are not present in the film. No doubt it’s a story of child abuse, so to have a persuasive, charming demon is very disturbing. There’s a lovely thrill when you hear the voice for the first time: ‘Would you like to play another game, Regan?’

What’s the greatest compliment someone could give you about your involvement in this project?

That changes as the show develops. I hope that my work is invisible, because we want the audience to be invested emotionally in the story. And so while any special effects require a level of analysis from the audience, we don’t want them to be so analytical that they’re pulled out of the story. They should just believe everything that’s happening in front of them. We don’t want them to see the artifice – that’s not useful information for them at that point. Afterwards, they can think about it. During the show, that’s not useful for them – it’s a distraction. So, that’s the best compliment, to be told it was amazing.

You seem very happy with how it’s all going.

I’m very pleased with the results. I’m in a different position now to where I could have been because I’m confident that the audience will be pleased with what they see. Now it’s all about smoothing over them. We’re spending a lot of time in stopping the audience from back tracking. They see something – a certain prop – and the next time they see it they try to work out how something was achieved… except that they won’t be able to, because we’ve deconstructed it.

Do you make the actors complicit in your tricks or do you operate the illusions around them?

They’re fundamentally the ones that are doing it, and a lot of my work goes into working with the actors in a different way to the director. The director will sculpt the performances and I unfortunately have to be the one who gives them a scientific and mathematical plot on top of that. We have to make sure that people can see the effects and that the actors are doing them justice; they have to handle the props like normal, everyday things.

This is the first show I’ve ever worked in where I’ve not had a speck of boredom. Normally when you work on a show and have seen it a lot of times an element of ‘I have to go to work’ creeps in, but not this one. The audience absolutely dictates what the performance will be. Sometimes they scream, some nights they are totally silent. Sometimes people laugh, and there are some moments of comedy. Everybody finds something different and lock into a rhythm. The audience bind together over this 100 minutes and find their groove… it’s very primal.

 

The Exorcist is playing at the Phoenix Theatre until March 2018. Tickets from http://www.atgtickets.com/shows/the-exorcist/phoenix-theatre/