“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.
