This is magic, in a nutshell
Ben Hart: The Nutshell Gilded Balloon Teviot (Venue 14)
A series of striking visual images loop through this stylish magic show from illusionist Ben Hart. There’s the image of a walnut, containing its tiny facsimile of the human brain. There are the miniature crime scenes, created by Chicago housewife Frances Glessner Lee. And you won’t forget the site of Hart apparently using himself as a human voodoo doll, drawing patterns on the floor in his own blood.
Hart is a charismatic stage presence with a sexy grownup Harry Potter look. And he has found the perfect Gothic setting in the Teviot dining room, with its dark-panelled wooden walls and its dusty boarding-school charm.
The audience walks across the stage when it enters, past the disarmingly simple array of props, a briefcase, a bowl of walnuts, a folded wooden box. The action is filmed throughout by an onstage cameraman and sections featuring close-up magic are flashed onto a giant screen. But it is still impossible to tell how cards appear and disappear, how items get inexplicably bigger or smaller and how feathers, silk scarves and other objects materialise.
It’s a high-tech show with a low-tech heart. Bursts of creepy electronic music add to the atmosphere but at the centre of it all is the magician, Hart, his hands, his arms, his pack of cards.
There’s a couple of bits of sexual innuendo thrown into the script which Hart doesn’t seem entirely comfortable with. But it’s a rare wrong note in a beautifully put together show.
At the end, as the audience walks back over the stage people stare at the props. A collection of seemingly simple objects has been transformed through skill and imagination and we still don’t know how it has been done.
Until 27 August. Today 8:15pm.