A matter of weeks after being delighted and confounded by Derren Brown, I’m very much here for a theatrical deep-dive into the history of illusion that takes in the “Mechanical Turk”, the magic pioneer Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin and the trailblazer in early cinema Georges Méliès. Alexis Michalik’s time-hopping The Art of Illusion – a hit in France as Le Cercle des Illusionnistes – has now been translated for the UK stage by playwright Waleed Akhtar (The P Word). Its Frenchness feels intact, mind you: it’s a jeu d’esprit that, like many a magic show, diverts from moment to moment but offers you very little to hang on to.
We’re lured into Tom Jackson Greaves’s production by the mysterious Watchmaker (Martin Hyder), an immortal spirit of magic who pops up throughout the several story strands. He orchestrates the shifts between 1844, when Robert-Houdin (after whom Houdini named himself) buys himself a theatre; 1888, when the bootmaker’s son Georges turns the same venue into a proto-cinema; and 1984, when romance blossoms between a thief and a woman whose bag he stole on the Paris Metro.
