The magical art of being ‘an expert at a skill that doesn't exist'
Visitors must pick their way over raised paving stones to avoid falling into the (non-existent) chasm below. Survivors reach one of Melbourne's best-kept secrets: the Laneway Theatre – a purpose-built theatrette (alongside a 'magic laboratory' crammed with memorabilia and tricks of the trade) hosting weekly magic shows for a select audience.
Ellis is also the director of the upcoming Melbourne Magic Festival, now in its 18th year, and one of the linchpins of Melbourne's close-knit magic scene. After avoiding plummeting to my doom, I join him upstairs in his elegant townhouse and ask how he become a magician.
'My grandfather gave me a magic set, the Hanky Panky set, when I was nine or 10,' says Ellis with a grin. 'He used to work as an electrician in Myer and every week we would go to his house. He'd have hand puppets and things, sometimes a toy, and one week this magic set. I learnt all the tricks … and put on shows for my family.'
Ellis developed a show, The Magic Box, based on the set, comparing what the tricks are like when you start off, and what they're like after 50 years honing stagecraft and misdirection skills.
Why did Ellis stick with magic – something many children try and few persevere with? He laughs: 'Because I have no other tangible skills!'
But there was a more personal reason, Ellis thinks.
'As I discovered later, I have autism,' he reflects. 'So, I guess in my brain it was, 'Aah! People are paying attention to me now, and I don't have to understand their complicated social interactions, all the shades of grey and body language and stuff. I can just create this world that I'm in charge of. People come into my world. I amaze them. And then I go away!' … I got to retreat into my little hermit cave or whatever.'
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A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story ★★★½ 'I am guilty; I'm a little confused.' So spoke Ruth Ellis, a 28-year-old Welsh-born nightclub hostess after firing five bullets into her lover, racing driver David Blakely, one Easter Sunday evening in 1955 London. Blakely's death spurred a notorious chapter in UK legal history and won Ellis enduring fame as the last woman to be hung in Britain. Her execution brought to the boil swelling opposition to capital punishment (permanently abolished for murder in 1969) and played a part in the introduction of the 'diminished responsibility' defence, allowing the verdict of manslaughter. It also shone a light on the alarmingly swift process to convict Ellis and the treatment of women, particularly those in the lower classes. It's the latter that A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story, ITV's magnetic, if occasionally hollow, four-part true-crime drama, magnifies with swish, hypnotic eloquence. Loading Adapted from Carol Ann Lee's biography, A Fine Day for Hanging: The Real Ruth Ellis Story, the series is so beautifully shot that the lighting, set and costume hues and poetic positioning of faces and body turn every frame into an Edward Hopper painting. The camera is either pulled back for beautiful scene compositions (the watery natural light in Ellis' prison cell, the smoke-fugged velvet-curtained nightclub where she hosted men, the ordered establishment of the wood-panelled courtroom with a male-only jury), or extraordinarily close-up. The hair's breadth's away lens is why this series belongs to actor Lucy Boynton (Bohemian Rhapsody). She plays Ellis, a tiny red-lipsticked platinum blonde and single mother-of-two, with a steely and compelling delicacy. There are times watching this series when I searched her face, its pores millimetres from the camera, for any glimmer of why Ellis refused, initially, to defend herself after her arrest. Boynton's facial movements are minute yet intensely perceptible, revealing inner turmoil and Ellis' long-honed resolve to endure lesser treatment. It's clear, if a little drawn out over the series' 160-minutes, that Blakely (Laurie Davidson), who meets Ellis at the Little Club in Knightsbridge which she managed, is a piece of work. Depicted as a privileged, hard-drinking and violent manipulator, his chaotic presence, which included repeated beatings, lasted two years before Ellis shot him. It's clear why but the people who could have helped mitigate her actions, and sentence, are everywhere – and equally at fault.
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If you look to the right as you walk inside Tim Ellis' home in Northcote, underneath an ersatz replica of Houdini's gravestone, you'll see a bottomless abyss – fair warning that you've entered a magician's lair. Visitors must pick their way over raised paving stones to avoid falling into the (non-existent) chasm below. Survivors reach one of Melbourne's best-kept secrets: the Laneway Theatre – a purpose-built theatrette (alongside a 'magic laboratory' crammed with memorabilia and tricks of the trade) hosting weekly magic shows for a select audience. Ellis is also the director of the upcoming Melbourne Magic Festival, now in its 18th year, and one of the linchpins of Melbourne's close-knit magic scene. After avoiding plummeting to my doom, I join him upstairs in his elegant townhouse and ask how he become a magician. 'My grandfather gave me a magic set, the Hanky Panky set, when I was nine or 10,' says Ellis with a grin. 'He used to work as an electrician in Myer and every week we would go to his house. He'd have hand puppets and things, sometimes a toy, and one week this magic set. I learnt all the tricks … and put on shows for my family.' Ellis developed a show, The Magic Box, based on the set, comparing what the tricks are like when you start off, and what they're like after 50 years honing stagecraft and misdirection skills. Why did Ellis stick with magic – something many children try and few persevere with? He laughs: 'Because I have no other tangible skills!' But there was a more personal reason, Ellis thinks. 'As I discovered later, I have autism,' he reflects. 'So, I guess in my brain it was, 'Aah! People are paying attention to me now, and I don't have to understand their complicated social interactions, all the shades of grey and body language and stuff. I can just create this world that I'm in charge of. People come into my world. I amaze them. And then I go away!' … I got to retreat into my little hermit cave or whatever.'
