If I were to recommend one thing to anyone going to London it would be to see Life of Pi on West End. This play was so beautiful with its story telling through the use of projections, life size animal puppets, and a number of other special effects. One of the most incredible moments in the play was when Pi leaps out of the boat and into the water, in this moment the actor jumps on to the stage where blue water is projected and disappears through a rubber trap door. He then pokes his head up through another trap door on the other side of the stage to create the allusion that he has been swimming underneath the water/stage, it was like watching a magic trick.
Now as amazing as this was, the use of trap doors in theatre is nothing new, and when I visited The Victoria and Albert Museum, I saw one of the earliest models of a stage trap door from the 1800’s. This model was made out of wood and was called a star trap due to its triangular flaps that when folded out looks like a star. When I saw this model of trap door my first thought was how dangerous it looked. The description stated that the flaps were meant to open when actors would be launched through them at high speeds with the help of a mechanical weighted platform device. Unless they were wearing helmets, which of course they weren’t, launching your head through a wooden flay had to be so painful and dangerous. In addition to this, the doors only opened one direction, so I imagine that if you ever only made it halfway through the star trap and then went back, you would be stabbed from all directions by the wooden points.
Due to the dangers of the star trap, I’m sure that the type of up bobbing up and down performed by Pi in the production I saw never could have been done with this type of trap door back in the day. Still it was fascinating to see an older version of a modern device. It’s cool to see where technology starts especially when compared to what it has become. It’s funny how relatable people from 200 years ago can still be to us today especially as theatre lovers. Even though they didn’t have projections or fog machines, they had mechanical devices that still created spectacles and wowed audiences just like how we do now.
But seriously this is the sketchiest thing I have ever seen. There’s no way this didn’t kill people. It looks like that’s what it was made to do.
Theatre in London U of A 