It could turn out to be a “now you see it, now you don’t” trick in which a million pounds vanishes into thin air, but producer Jamie Hendry is convinced the West End is ready again for a full-scale stage magic show.
“Magic is cool again,” he insisted. “Magicians like Derren Brown and David Blaine are filling stadiums; a magician made it into the last round of Britain’s Got Talent; the BBC is doing a magic drama – a new generation is discovering magic. There hasn’t been a show like this in the West End probably for a hundred years, but it’s time. We’re going for close-up magic, but also grand illusions like materialising a helicopter on stage.”
There will be no dancers, comedians or singers in Impossible – “this is not just a variety show”, Hendry said sternly – which opens at the Noel Coward theatre in July for a five-week run. The eight professional magicians apply a few new tricks to ancient illusions: Magical Bones does a backflip as he pulls off a classic card trick, and Jamie Allan pulls a bunch of flowers out of an iPad before sawing a woman in half with a livid green laser.
Ali Cook performs in jeans and T-shirt as he escapes from shackles holding him inside a padlocked and strapped tank of water, a version of the Chinese water torture cell, a trick perfected a century ago by the most famous escapologist of all time, Harry Houdini – although Goodwin’s tank holds 80 litres of water, while Houdini eventually performed the trick on a grander scale, in front of audiences of thousands in a tank holding 20,000 litres.
Katherine Mills, one of the few women members of the Magic Circle, the jealously guarded elite trade organisation, said her friends were incredulous when she left university with a psychology degree and took up full-time magic. “Now they’re pretty impressed, actually – and I don’t even have to do children’s parties any longer,” she said.
As she spoke, she folded a £5 note two inches from my nose and, unfolded, it transformed into £10. She then folded it again and it became £50. Mills says she was inspired by Blaine, whose public stunts include standing for 72 hours on top of a pillar in New York in a web of electrical discharges, and being encased in a transparent box for 44 days beside the river Thames in London.
“It’s such a secretive mysterious world, I was fascinated. You can’t just read a book and find out how to do it,” Mills said. “I started working out how to do a few things, and then gradually realised I was good at it, that this was something I could really do.”
Hendry, whose West End appearances include the Beatles show Let It Be and the multi-award-winning stage version of the film Legally Blonde, says magic has been associated for decades with end of the pier shows and Sunday night television variety, but the new generation of magicians has transformed its image. If the show succeeds, he plans to bring it back next year for a longer season.
He has wanted to do this show for 30 years, he says, since he was a small boy with a Paul Daniels conjuring set. “I was useless. I managed to get the three red balls right, but I could never do anything with the rest of the tricks in the box. But I loved it, still do.”
