Paquet’s Prestige

By Alissa Watson

The 2006 movie, The Prestige, opens with Michael Caine detailing the three acts of every great magic trick:

The first part is called "The Pledge". The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course... it probably isn't.

The second act is called "The Turn". The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know.

You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back. That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call "The Prestige".

David Paquet’s Wildfire, a magic trick of a play, similarly unfolds in three parts; Part One: “The Stake”, Part Two: “The Dragons” and Part Three: “The Fever”. But why the number three?

In CBC Radio’s Ideas: The Magic of 3, it is evident that “we learn from a very early age that when the number three becomes dominant there’s something story like, something not exactly fictive but different going on. It’s like entering an enchanted realm where the possibilities are fantastic”. Three is the number of invocation and incantation: how many stories can you name that include three wishes, three witches, or three visits from ghosts of the past, present, and future? In theatre and film, the three-act dramatic structure has dominated storytelling from late-nineteenth century Modernism to contemporary rom-coms. And in Wildfire—over three acts—we meet three triplets, living in a triplex, over three generations, chasing their tails while they search for contentment.

When Paquet started Wildfire, he wanted to create a black comedy that borrowed from the codes of Greek tragedy. In Greek tragedy we often see the protagonist falling to disaster through personal failings or their circumstances. In Oedipus the King, we watch Oedipus live out his doom in an antagonistic relationship with a divinity. In The Oresteia, Aeschylus traces the story of Agamemnon and his family, exposing their dysfunctionality as a symptom of their lineage and social context. Paquet’s research into his own genealogy brought him to Greek tragedy as he considered what it is like to live with the feeling of being condemned, incapable of escaping one’s own destiny.

Also prevalent in Paquet’s play is the presence of a circular narrative, which emphasises the idea of eternal return. In ancient Greece, the Stoics believed the universe went through repeating stages of transformation where events were destined to repeat themselves in an infinite loop. Often contemporary writers who employ a circular design to their stories are commenting on something very specific. The circle, with its absence of corners or edges, suggests an ongoing continuum, a timelessness (eternity), or the absence of beginnings or endings. As characters move through life, death and rebirth in Wildfire, you may notice that Paquet’s cheeky ending speaks to the tragic notions of curse, fate, and the interconnectedness of past, present and future by the ancient Greeks.

If you are looking for the secrets in Paquet’s magic trick, keep your eyes peeled for patterns throughout the story. However, you may need to see the production a second – or better yet, a third – time to fully determine Paquet’s prestige.

Sisyphus (1548–49) by Titian.

According to Greek mythology, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to roll a boulder up a steep hill for eternity only for it to roll back down each time it neared the top.

Published December 2024