Talent, Olivier once said,is very plentiful but skill is rather rare.
But Ricky Jay, the American sleight-of-hand artist who regularly pops up in David Mamet movies, offers us two hours of pure, unadulterated, mesmerising skill: you watch entranced as he proves his own affirmation that playing-cards are "the poetry of magic".
Part of the pleasure is that Ricky Jay is nothing like the average vaudeville entertainer. A portly, brown-suited figure with thinning hair and thick forearms, he faintly resembles Orson Welles, who also practised theatrical magic,in his mixture of irony and erudition.
He doesn't just use a pack of cards to display manual mastery. He gives us the history of trickery and conmanship, invokes legendary illusionists and, at one point, quotes WE Henley's translation of Francois Villon.
I don't remember David Nixon doing that. Jay's performance space is the transfigured Old Vic stage, where 160 of us sit in 10 tiered rows.
Inside a mock-Victorian drawing-room, he proceeds to dazzle us at close range.
He makes aces and queens appear and re-appear at will. He explains the technique of three-card monty, he turns cards into hurled weapons, even piercing the outer skin of a huge water melon, and he offers endless variations on thimble-rigging in which coloured balls multiply and move around under copper cups.
Is it theatre? You bet it is. In fact, this extraordinary show, which David Mamet has directed and which I first caught in Melbourne, epitomises the two key movements in modern theatre. In one sense, it is deeply illusionist: we are baffled and bemused as a card, on which an audience-member has inscribed her name, turns up in a sealed pack inside a suitcase. But it is also anti-illusionist in the Brechtian sense.
Ricky Jay seems to be watching himself perform. In the case of that particular trick, he permits himself a wry smile as he remarks, with scant regard for truth, that the case has hitherto been closed.
In short, Ricky Jay affords a dual pleasure: that of watching a sleight-of-hand genius at work while reminding us that he belongs in the salty tradition of the carnival trickster. Prices at the Old Vic are steep, but it is worth raiding your piggy-bank for an awe-inspiring display of expertise.
