COLIN’S NO NAME FOR A MAGICIAN!
The Illusionists (Shaftesbury Theatre) Verdict: Watchable hokum
★★★✩✩
STAGE magic shows have become buffets of the most frightful hokum — but quite watchable and clever nonetheless.
Sharp-suited blokes with designer stubble invite young women on stage, look deep into their eyes and proceed to ‘read their minds’.
At the same time, pretentious music is played and we are told all sorts of tooth rot about how ‘anything is possible’ in life.
If that’s true, chum, why are you playing the Shaftesbury Theatre on a wet Tuesday and not sitting on a beach in Antigua?
The Illusionists gives us seven or eight acts (there was an extra, guest performer the night I went, some telly chap I’d never heard of). The regular stars are The Manipulator (a slightly trembly American, as butch as Nimble sliced bread), The Weapons Master, who has a Seventies hairdo and shoots a crossbow, and The Deductionist, who turns out to be called Colin Cloud. Colin? It’s hardly a name for a stage great, he maybe felt.
Jamie Raven, from Britain’s Got Talent, does some neat tricks, as does a tubby, middle-aged fellow from Michigan who goes under the name The Inventor and resembles Kentucky Fried Chicken’s Colonel Sanders. His chainsaw laboratory sketch is a gory corker.
But my favourite was The Trickster, another American, David Williamson, who has a touch of Tommy Cooper to his humorously accidentprone conjuring.
The highlight of the evening for many was escapologist Andrew Basso who got himself out of a water tank, having been handcuffed and padlocked.
Some 20 minutes before the end of this overlong campery, I rather envied him his ability to elude his gaolers.