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The startling true story of Harry Houdini's beloved wife and her breakdown in the aftermath of his death. The world knew Bess as Houdini's loyal partner, both on and off stage, his inspiration, his guiding star - Or was their perfect marriage their greatest illusion? It is 1929, the height of the Spiritualist frenzy. Houdini, the world's first Superstar, has been dead two years and all attempts to contact him have failed. Yet surely if anyone can break through from the Other Side, it's Harry. Meanwhile his widow, Bess, his beloved partner both offstage and on, is alone and lost, her fragile health already stretched thin by years of living in daily fear as her husband was buried alive, flung manacled into icy rivers and dangled upside down ten stories high in a strait jacket. Now she is deeply in debt, struggling with addiction and desperate to stay in the public eye. When she is accused of rigging a séance, and with the press hounding her as a fraud, she is forced to flee to a private sanitarium. Does she truly believe her husband has reached out to her from the Beyond? Or, haunted as she is by her own memories and hallucinations, can she even tell the difference? Her doctor is up-to-date with the latest treatments but neither he, nor her celebrity-obsessed nurse, nor her hovering family, can make the slightest dent in her despair. As she battles with her own demons, she stumbles upon devastating clues about Houdini's secret life, leading to the revelation that their perfect marriage may have been the greatest illusion of them all. But if everything she built her life upon was only for show, how will she be able to survive Life after Harry?| 24 Oct 23 to 12 Nov 23 | Upstairs at the Gatehouse Inner London, Greater London Performance Details => Venue archive |
