“That feeling you have right now,” says Colin Cloud, putting his cards down, “it’s wonderful, right?” He has just performed a baffling trick that somehow allowed me to read his mind, and he leans back, pleased at my stunned reaction. “That is the feeling we don’t get any more, so remember what it feels like.” Then he tells me how he did it.
The Scottish mentalist, often called the real-life Sherlock Holmes, is about to take a break from his nightly performances in Las Vegas to premiere his new show at the Edinburgh fringe. He will be performing alongside more than 50 other magicians who are artfully rolling up their sleeves for this year’s festival. With magic shows traversing cabaret, comedy, horror and myth, each is hoping to dazzle audiences with an impossible feat of mentalism, like Cloud, or spectacular sleight-of-hand and illusion, like magician and magic designer Ben Hart, who, eyebrow cocked, gazes firmly at a little ball of scrunched-up tinfoil that he is holding up.
“This trick is many centuries old and the basis of all sleight of hand,” Hart says, as he effortlessly makes the ball disappear and reappear again. Alongside his own shows, Hart creates illusions for stage productions, guiding the performers in how to interact confidently and convincingly with the tricks. “Magic is only really acting,” Hart asserts as he teaches me the French drop: a false transfer that makes it look as if you are passing something from one hand to the other, while it secretly drops into your palm. “If I tell you I’m shuffling a deck of cards and I’m not, it takes a lot of acting skill within my body and breath to convince you that I’m doing it.” His eyes follow the ball as he passes it from hand to hand, sometimes for real, sometimes using the finger-and-thumb trick to make it vanish. The movements look identical. He smiles and looks up. “You have to be very good at lying.”
Taking inspiration from his Indian heritage and the intimate ideas of Indian street magic, this will be Hart’s 10th show at the fringe. Called Jadoo, it uses simpler effects than some of his previous productions, echoing the travelling-light nature of a street magician. “Deft use of simple tools is all we need,” he says with serene confidence. Hart builds every element of his show himself, having learned through magic not just about psychology and stagecraft, but also engineering, mechanics, electronics and carpentry. “I’m a one-man shop,” he says proudly. Performing Jadoo in the round at Edinburgh’s Spiegeltent, there will be nowhere for him to hide: he has to make every trick he performs appear immaculate to every person, from every angle – something he concedes is not easy, even with all his years of experience. “In my hour-long show, at least one thing goes wrong every night,” Hart readily admits. “That’s live theatre.”
It’s a rare event to have a festival brimming with magic shows, but Hart thinks the plethora of performances at the fringe encourages contrast, not competition. “Because magic is such a niche field,” he says, “audiences don’t get to understand style. But in Edinburgh, they get to see the different voices.” For mentalist Suhani Shah, who has been performing professionally in India to crowds of thousands since she was seven years old, the fringe isn’t only a chance for new audiences to meet her, but for her to meet fellow magicians. “In a way,” she says, “I feel this is my introduction to the world in one go.”
When she was six, Shah convincced her parents that she was serious about magic with a trick using the chapati dough they would roll every night. She placed the dough over her eyes so that she couldn’t see and got her parents to write down any word in Gujarati, a language she did not know how to write. With her eyes covered, she wrote down the exact word they had chosen. “It’s funny,” Shah muses, “I know how I do that act now, but I don’t know how I knew it then. Nobody taught me. I think I just used basic logic.”
Shah’s new show, Spellbound, is a tightly packed hour of her very best acts, selected and squeezed in from the usual three-and-a-half hour show she does in India. As a child, Shah began as a traditional illusionist, working with two trucks-worth of tricks and 30 assistants. With the rise of standup across India, she made her show smaller and more focused on mentalism than grand illusions. “Now, when something goes wrong,” she says, “it is only my confidence and experience that I have at hand to support me.” When she started out, the attitude towards magicians in India was largely dismissive, especially of women. “I used to hear things like: ‘Who’s going to marry her’?” she says. “It was taboo.” Today, her live shows sell out stadiums.
Another performer pushing for progress in the way the artform is represented is Naomi Paxton, who came to magic through the role of a mouthy assistant to a silent magician. The duo would perform late night shows at Jermyn Street, a theatre so tiny, Paxton says gleefully, that if you did a disappearing trick, “The audience knew you hadn’t gone through the floor or out the back.” A researcher and historian, her act evolved into the solo performances of Ada Campe, exuberant magician and cabaret artist. A throwback to the variety shows of the grand old music hall, Ada is “playful, silly and unpredictable”, says Paxton, “but not in a frightening way.”
Paxton is the equality, diversity and inclusion officer for The Magic Circle, Britain’s prestigious magic society, which has “traditionally been very white and male”, she says; the group only started accepting women in 1991. Her role is to help them think about how magic can be more inclusive and representative. Part of the reason she wanted to join was that she “knew there were so many women in history who would not have had the opportunity to do so”. In Paxton’s show, with Ada’s wildly imaginative, truth-adjacent storytelling, she wants to celebrate “the brilliant, quirky history of women in variety, and to challenge who is in the record”.
Ada Campe’s act this year is the nautical-pun packed Naval Gazing, which encourages a communal embrace of silliness. Paxton shows me her hat for her new show, a glittering, sequin-covered boat with a glorious golden sail. She never pretends to be able to read minds, using instead a foil such as a psychic duck – or, as is the case for Naval Gazing, the much larger Celia the seal, who has to be reinflated for every show. “She’ll never tell,” Paxton cries. “Her lips are sealed!”
Shah also tells people that she can’t read minds and does not have supernatural powers, but as the world’s most subscribed mentalist on YouTube, many people don’t quite believe her. She is repeatedly sent requests from strangers: will she work out their partner’s phone password? Can she predict what questions will be on the exam next week? The demands can be more serious, too. “Whenever there is a crime in India on a national level, my inbox and the comment section of my videos get filled with people saying, ‘Figure out who’s the murderer,’” she says. Cloud has a similar problem; a woman once flew halfway round the world to ask him to help her track down a missing relative. “Some people prey on that grief,” Cloud says, “but I’m very honest that what I’m doing is entertainment and that’s where I draw the line.”
Attracted to the stories of Sherlock Holmes as a child, Cloud developed an intense interest in forensic science. An early university entrance at 15 led to a focus on criminal profiling, which, when blended with standup, formed the start of his act of mentalism. Cloud is perhaps best known for his performances on America’s Got Talent, a role for which he studied Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway, to see what kind of “clickbait” entertainment appealed to the audience. His aim has always been to make magic look good. “Every TV appearance I’ve ever done has been about getting people to live shows.” His new production, After Dark, is “the most honest, personal, vulnerable show I’ve ever done”, he says, in which he talks candidly about the struggles he has had with his mental health in recent years. “Instead of revealing secrets about the audience, this is very much about me sharing my secrets with them.”
Secrecy is the marrow of magic. This gets a little complicated when I ask them all if they will teach me a trick. “The reason magic has thrived so many years is because magicians have kept the secrets,” Shah says, keeping her cards close to her chest. She is rightfully protective. “It’s so difficult in these times to keep a secret,” she says. “Everything is out there. Magic is magic because of the secrets and the mystery around it.”
Paxton is similarly cautious. “The only thing about being a member of The Magic Circle,” she says hesitantly, “is that you can genuinely get hauled up in front of the exposure committee for exposing secrets.” Magic blabbermouths Penn & Teller have famously not been allowed to join the group. Still, once sworn to secrecy, she happily lets me into the trick that opens her new show, a nifty bit of magic that would have made me far more interested in maths at school.
Hart and Cloud share more readily. For Hart, giving people a peek into the workings of magic is only a positive thing. “Magicians have kept it so secret in the past that it’s been detrimental to them,” he says. He has made a career out of being a communicator of magic. “Sometimes a secret is beautiful, and the beautiful ones we should talk about.”
With each trick, it feels like being handed something precious. Cloud says the “how” is the boring bit, but there’s something glorious in the mundanity of the reveal, the practised mechanics of the act. I perform the card trick he teaches me to anyone who will sit still for long enough, and each time it makes me feel fizzy. For Cloud, the aim has always been to transcend the level of simply seeing his tricks as a puzzle to be solved. It’s not so much about secrecy, but shifting the focus from the secret. “If you leave my show just wondering how I did it, then I’ve failed,” he says. “If you get an audience to transcend that, that’s when I can create an experience that feels like you are part of a special effects movie.”
However good it feels to learn and perform a trick, nothing can beat the awe of having one performed just for you, a feeling Cloud says he aims for no matter how big the audience is. Before we go, he picks up a piece of slate and chalk. “Just so you don’t forget that feeling,” he says, “do me a favour,” and asks me to think of someone who hasn’t crossed my mind in years. He plucks the name out of my head with outrageous ease. This time, I am delighted not to know how he did it.
