As if by Magic

Magic has always been stock fare at the Fringe. But with the bedding-in of the Edinburgh International Magic Festival over recent years, Scottish audiences are getting more accustomed to it as a major art form. Many will recognise the guise in which actor-clown-magician Geoff Sobelle returns this year with Elephant Room: part of a chaotic trio of jesters who are out to trick and deceive spectators with their sleight-of-hand.

The ways in which conjurers weave storytelling into their routines are becoming ever more technically accomplished and theatrical. In Elephant Room, Sobelle explains that “we're dealing with something that's very American, about an ageing magician: a little bit like when you've been chasing down your dreams and time has caught up with you."

Sobelle continues a decade-long collaboration with fellow clown Trey Lyford (joined this year by Steve Cuiffo), to elegise a subtle side of western identity that Sobelle started to explore in Flesh and Blood & Fish and Fowl back in 2010. It reveals one comic and tragically illusory aspect of the American Dream: the demand that you must be calmly resolute to reach your goals, when really the whole pursuit is hectic and random.

“There's three of them up there," explains Sobelle, “which in a magic show is very rare. It's almost like you don't know where to look, although it’s tightly choreographed, and there’s a real feeling of mayhem as they tell you a little too much about their own personal lives."

In Sobelle's second show, The Object Lesson, audiences are invited to search far more literally; and in an altogether more immersive and intriguing environment. This is his stage venture: a single-room installation in a space which won’t be shared by any other show at Summerhall. The room is stacked with boxes, "which audiences should be ready to explore," he nudges, and we’re invited to lose ourselves amongst the memories within.

"The piece has no story, no characters, no fiction," Sobelle explains. "It's an installation you’re confronted with that's fully interactive. People have very different reactions to it because ultimately I wanted to make a piece about you, not about me. I see myself as a facilitator in a way, administering an agnostic ritual."

Sobelle was inspired in this venture by American comic George Carlin. "He has this famous routine about our ‘stuff’ and why everyone else's stuff is shit!" laughs Sobelle. But, he says, "there aren't any politics [in the show], nothing didactic; it's actually more human. It's the way objects trigger memories. It's funny to recognise the attachment we have with things and the way objects demark time, unearthing the hidden life of our relationships with them.

"If it's done correctly, the piece is less about when you go to the theatre and say ‘that was such an amazing story’, but more about you and realising the story your own objects tell you about yourself."