Tricks of the Trade

Looking to add a little magic to your Edinburgh experience? You’re spoilt for choice this year – and there’s not a rabbit or scantily clad assistant in sight.

This year’s Fringe features a veritable magic circle of cutting-edge conjurers, arch psychics, sly illusionists and card manipulators, as well as the granddaddy of British tricksters Paul Daniels.

Gone are the days of tight-fitting trousers, bad music and mullets; this generation of magicians are splicing together the amazing and befuddling with the macabre and comedic in a constant quest to bring something unique to audiences.

It’s a trend which has grabbed the attention of the all-powerful television commissioners. While standups have cashed in thanks to Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow and Live at the Apollo, magicians too have seen their stock rise on prime-time TV with The Magicians on BBC1 and Penn & Teller: Fool Us on ITV1.

Scotland’s own Barry and Stuart are regular fixtures on the BBC show and are typical of the new breed in that, following a childhood of magic sets and card tricks, they quickly took their chosen art form in new directions.

“We both started with the usual thing of pissing off our friends with the usual tricks, but it wasn’t until we were 19 and started working together that we decided to throw away all that crap and started recording our own short films incorporating magic,” explains Barry Jones.

“We felt like the tricks weren’t that important,” adds Stuart MacLeod. “The magic was there to move the plot forward and we were interested in getting the whole range of emotions, including humour, out of it.

“We started out from the point that we hated these ego-filled magician characters who were powerful and could do no wrong. We wondered what would happen if we took that power away and made any ability a bad thing. I suppose it is just typical British self-deprecating humour.”

Since then it’s been a dizzying trip to the top for the award-winning duo, who bring two shows to the Fringe – The Show (where they do the tricks) and The Tell (where they explain their methods). They say it follows a tradition that goes back to Magic Circle founder David Devant revealing the secrets of fraudulent spiritualists in the 19th century.

The common thread with much of the current wave of British magic is the refusal to take itself too seriously, bucking against the old stereotype of the infallible po-faced illusionist. Today, many seem as proud of their jokes as their tricks.

Fringe favourite Pete Firman, who started playing comedy clubs as a way of getting regular gigs, explains: “Comedy and magic are great bedfellows. The UK has a great tradition of humorous magicians – we don’t do the super-serious magic fellas.

“The comedy can strengthen the magic and also, depending on your style, makes you more ‘real’. Preparing is exactly the same as a comic. The big difference is the props. I might have something remade three or four times during a period of refinement, but with a joke you just take out a word or add a word.”

Ali Cook, Firman’s co-star on Channel 5’s ground-breaking Monkey Magic, echoes this idea that the mechanics of comedy and magic share common ground.

The former British close-up magic champion says: “Both are all about expectation and surprise. Most of the time in magic there is the set-up, ‘there is nothing in my hand’, then the punchline, ‘there is something in my hand’.”

One performer who has taken irreverence to new heights is John van der Put. He’s better known as Piff the Magic Dragon and was one of the unexpected hits of last year’s Fringe. Dressed as a cuddly-looking mythological beastie he appears the very definition of a low-status comedy character – a role he relishes.

“It’s really difficult to set yourself up on stage as having magic powers without coming across as a complete arsehole," he says. “If I find I could really do these things I would not be choosing to find the four of diamonds. I woud be on an island surrounded by princesses.

“Life as a magician is ridiculous, so what better way to prove it than a costume that looks as ridiculous as I feel? Conversely, I’ve found the suit gives me much more room on stage to be smug, arrogant, flirty, nerdy and generally self-absorbed, and somehow get away with it. Who would have thought?”

While it's long been the done thing for magicians to encroach on the comedy circuit, at least one comic is taking the reverse journey.

Tom Binns, previously known for his hospital DJ character Ivan Brackenbury, garnered a stack of four and five star reviews with his Sunderland psychic Ian D Montfort last year. To prepare he learned the tricks of the trade in just eight months from "thought magician" Philip Escoffey, himself a performer in Edinburgh this year.

While most magicians say they start with the tricks and then add the comedy, Binns says the jokes come first every time.

“This year I hope the magic is less apparent,” he says. “The best analogy is when Hollywood gets a big new special effect, like morphing. It’s everywhere and obvious, then people get used to it and they start using the effect in a more subtle and effective way.”

And he has a warning to all those who miss out on the big bucks offered by television.

“When I started doing standup it was about people coming out to see something they couldn’t see on television, now they come out to see something because they’ve already seen it on the television. There seems to be more magic on television now so it could well have a similar effect.”

Someone not so concerned about the wellbeing of magic is Paul Daniels who, despite his many naysayers, can rightly lay claim to the title of most successful television magician of all time.

This year sees him return to the Fringe for the first time since his debut in 2003 with a set that promises the same comedic flourishes that were evident in his hugely popular BBC show which, lest we forget, ran for an astonishing 16 years between 1979 and 1994.

He baulks at the suggestion that magic has ever been anything other than popular with the public, blaming “the very few people who decide what you are going to watch on TV” for any perception of it going out of fashion.

He adds: “I have never worried about the future of the oldest theatrical art form. If I vanished a pebble 5,000 years ago and did it well, it would have got the same reaction that it would get on a beach in the year 3000AD.”