Jamie Harrison: ‘I cried with relief when the first Harry Potter audience cheered’
While at drama school, Jamie Harrison tried to hide ‘the magic stuff’ that interested him, but that eventually became the cornerstone of his career and led to his biggest job, creating the illusions for JK Rowling’s play. He tells Fergus Morgan what the West End smash shares with his globally acclaimed model-box show Flight, which has just touched down in London
It is hard to imagine a more Covid-secure production than Flight, which arrives in London this month. The show, which tells the story of two Afghan children journeying across Europe, asks audience members to sit in individual booths, watching miniature models in a revolving diorama and listening to pre-recorded actors via headphones.
“From an operational point of view, the show is quite simple,” says co-director Jamie Harrison. “It only requires front-of-house staff to work. So having to pause it and switch it on again further down the line is actually much less difficult than with other shows. And our motto has always been to be flexible anyway.”
Not that Harrison and Candice Edmunds – the creative duo that make up Vox Motus, the Glasgow-based company behind Flight – had anything like a global pandemic in mind when they designed the show for the 2017 Edinburgh International Festival. Back then, they were simply concerned about how best to adapt Caroline Brothers’ novel Hinterland for the theatre.
“We read the book and were so moved and shocked and disgusted at what can happen to child migrants,” Harrison says. “We wanted to make a piece of work that would bring audiences closer to their actual experience, in a way that newspaper articles about it just can’t. Newspapers can bring opinion and statistics and reportage, which is important. What we can do, as artists, is bring people into the experience of being a migrant.”
They were doing a model presentation on another project, when inspiration struck. “Someone stuck their head into our model box and said they felt like they could crush this tiny world. And that comment really stuck with us. We realised we could put the viewer of Flight in that powerful position and emphasise the extreme vulnerability of the show’s characters.”
That concept, combined with Oliver Emanuel’s script and first-person research conducted with child migrants in Paris, has proved potent. Since 2017, Flight has garnered acclaim in Melbourne, Brighton, Abu Dhabi, and New York, where it was picked as one of the New York Times’ “Unforgettable Theatre Moments of 2018”.
“People want to experience the show because of the concept,” Harrison says. “But pretty soon, they engage with the story and end up very close to the truth of what happens to child migrants. And that’s a very powerful thing. Even when I watch it, I have to go and sit down for five minutes afterwards and pull myself together.”
Related to this article
Q&A Jamie Harrison
What was your first non-theatre job?
I have never had a job that wasn’t to do with magic or theatre.
What was your first professional theatre job?
I did my first magic show when I was 12 at a tennis club in Sunderland. I was paid £25.
What do you wish someone had told you when you were starting out?
To stop worrying about everything and just get on with it.
Who or what was your biggest influence?
The reason I decided to become a theatremaker was seeing Robert Lepage at Newcastle Theatre Royal.
If you hadn’t been a theatremaker, what would you have been?
Hopefully an architect, but I’m not sure I’d have got the grades.
Do you have any theatrical superstitions or rituals?
Candice and I always have a glass of wine together on opening night, usually somewhere far away from
the crowds.
As a boy growing up in the north-east of England, Harrison’s first love was magic, not theatre.
“I hurt my leg really badly when I was nine and had to spend some time in hospital,” he says. “A friend’s mum bought me a magic set and I would play with it in the ward, performing tricks for other kids, for nurses, for doctors. It all started there.”
An appearance on national television – the result of a friendship with the magician Martin Duffy – was enough for Harrison to catch the bug of performing tricks more seriously. As a teenager, he would regularly perform professionally, and when still in sixth form, landed a job performing for an international hotel chain in Thailand.
“I was in Thailand, on my own, working as a magician, as an 18-year-old,” says Harrison. “And I realised that a life like that is very lonely and very repetitive. It was incredible, but inside I felt really miserable. All my friends back home had gone off to drama school, and were discussing Shakespeare and Ibsen and Beckett, and I was performing the same tricks week after week. So I decided to go home and join them.”
It was while training to be an actor at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland that Harrison met Edmunds. They collaborated on a project, liked working together, and decided to form Vox Motus – the name means “voice and movement” in Latin – upon graduating.
“I realised that it wasn’t acting that excited me, it was making,” says Harrison. “When I first started at drama school, I tried to hide the magic stuff I’d done. I was ashamed of it. But it slowly crept back in because we realised that was what set us apart as a company. Finding solutions for problems is a magician’s bread and butter, and that is what helped us make unusual pieces of work that people paid attention to.”
Harrison’s magical abilities ended up being the cornerstone of his career. He has designed illusions for the West End production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and for the National Theatre’s adaptations of The Ocean at the End of the Lane and Pinocchio. In 2016, magic led him to the biggest job of his career – collaborating with Jack Thorne, John Tiffany and JK Rowling on Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.
“I still pinch myself about that,” he says. “I was driving across rural Scotland when I got the call from John telling me I’d got the job. I got out of the car and started pacing up and down this country lane, screaming, with a whole load of sheep looking at me.”
He continues: “There was all this pressure outside the rehearsal room – online, on the telly, in the papers – but inside the room it was joyful. It was a group of people who were so adept and so confident in what they were doing, and so collaborative, that it was actually really fun. We became really close friends. We still talk to each other all the time.”
What pleased Harrison most about working on Harry Potter, though, was how integrated his work was into the entire creative process. “If I’m going to work on a show, I always insist on being part of the creative team from the beginning, from the initial script discussions. Otherwise it feels like a whole load of magic tricks have been imposed at the last minute,” he says.
“I am so proud of Harry Potter because John integrated the magic side of things from the beginning. I was always there for Jack and John and Jo to bounce ideas off, and I could always suggest things that might work well, or work better. I remember when the first preview audience came in, I was sitting in the middle of the stalls and so nervous about how it was going to go down. When the first few magic moments happened, the audience screamed and cheered and applauded. I sat there crying with relief.”
They are two shows on a very different scale, but Harrison thinks that both Flight and the Harry Potter play were successful for the same reason – a magical marriage of form and story. “I don’t really agree with the separation of story and form,” he says. “It’s something we talk about a lot when we are making work as Vox Motus. Think about ballet. In ballet, the form is also the narrative, and the narrative can make people cry. It’s the same with a great piece of music.”
He adds: “I think theatre is at its best when it does the same. The best theatre integrates what the audience is hearing and seeing and feeling with the story and the character. That’s what I have always tried to do.”
CV Jamie Harrison
Born: 1978, Berwick-upon-Tweed
Training: Royal Conservatoire of Scotland
Landmark productions:
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, West End, London (2013)
• Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, West End (2016)
• Flight, Edinburgh International Festival (2017)
• The Magic Flute, Quebec Opera Festival (2018)
Flight is at the Bridge Theatre from December 10 to January 16. For more details, visit: bridgetheatre.co.uk
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