Search

Toggle dark mode:

Saved articles

You have not yet added any article to your bookmarks!

Browse articles

GDPR Compliance

We use cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. By continuing to use our site, you accept our use of cookies, Privacy Policy, and Terms of Service.

Ben Hart on vanishing coins, eerie dreams and why real magic happens after the lights go down

James Macfarlane James Macfarlane
14 Jul 2025

James Macfarlane speaks to Ben Hart about all things magic and illusion in his new show.

I’m not trying to fool people – I’m trying to remind them that not everything has to make sense to be meaningful

You’ve said that this show feels different, and that you’re no longer sure where the trick ends. What changed for you in the way you perform or think about magic?

My journey in magic has been full of surprises and seems to constantly evolve. I’m always searching for ways to make the work more astonishing – not just in the moment, but in the echo it leaves behind. I’ve come to realise the magic doesn’t end when the trick does – it lingers in memory, reshaping itself over time.

Now, I think about what I’m crafting not just for the stage, but for the days, even years, that follow. It’s a kind of memory-hacking – a quiet trick that plays on long after the lights go down.

There’s a tension in this show between performance and something genuinely uncanny. Do you still consider yourself a magician first, or has that definition shifted?

In some ways, I find the term magician a bit limiting – it still conjures images of sparkly cloaks and dancing assistants, which couldn’t be further from what I do. But at the same time, I’m proud to use it. A magician is, at heart, someone who keeps dreaming in a world that often finds fantasy embarrassing. I think we need more of that, not less.

I always play the magic as if it’s completely real – for me, it is. And something strange happens when I commit to that: by the end of the show, the audience often starts to believe too. That’s where the tension lies – the shift from scepticism to surrender. And that’s the space where the real magic lives.

Your shows often blend darkness, charm and theatricality. What makes The Remarkable Ben Hart distinct from your previous Fringe shows?

Each year, I try to create a show that kills off the last one – shedding its skin completely. I change the tone, the aesthetic, the material… always revealing a new corner of myself that hasn’t been seen before.

This time, the setting is clinical. The stage feels more like a laboratory for wonder. The magic is stripped back – no clutter, almost no props. Just me, a live video camera that lets us zoom in to forensic levels, and the audience’s thoughts.

Much of the show is shaped by a series of strange dreams I’ve been having – so it’s intimate, unsettling, and just a little surreal.

In 2023, I was a huge supporter of Colin Cloud’s After Dark – another show that danced between illusion and true mentalism. How do you feel your work sits within that space of mystery, psychology and belief?

Colin is a great friend and we frequently talk to each other about ideas (we’ve even done a few TV shows together). I’m a big fan.

My work lives in that same blurred space, I think, between mystery, illusion and mentalism. I’m not so interested in proving something – I’m more drawn to creating an atmosphere where the impossible feels possible. Where the audience isn’t sure if they’ve witnessed a trick, or just remembered something strange.

For me, magic should make you question the rules you live by. It should feel like a dream that’s just beginning to crack – a psychological fog, where the audience leans forward and wonders, what if this is real?

Any one moment in my show might secretly be achieved by sleight of hand, hidden mechanics, or my genuine psychology and the kind of sixth sense you get when you spend your life looking at audiences and how people behave… I love the synthesis of all of those things.

You talk about thoughts coming to you before they should. What’s the most unsettling moment you’ve experienced on stage lately? Has anything genuinely surprised even you?

There was a night last year when I vanished a coin… and it genuinely vanished. It wasn’t in my sleeve, my pocket – nowhere. For a moment, I thought I’d slipped into my own trick. That was unsettling.

After the show I checked my pockets, I looked on the floor etc. I promise you it genuinely vanished somewhere. Maybe it will turn up somewhere strange (like in the lining of my jacket or something) one day, or maybe I really did do it right finally…

You’ve created magic for everyone from Penn & Teller to Tom Cruise. How does returning to the Fringe, where everything is stripped back, compare to working on that kind of grand scale?

The Fringe is the truth. No cranes, no pyro, no second takes – just you and the audience, inches away, sharing the same breath.

I’ve worked on huge sets with enormous budgets, but at the Fringe, there are no producers watering things down, no committees. It’s pure. It’s personal.

Here, I get to follow a strange idea all the way to the edge – without having to explain it to anyone. It’s the only place where I can be completely myself and still be believed.

Here I can set my own rules and be agile with my creativity, responding more directly to the audience. And we still manage to sneak in the occasional grand moment – where the scale or something surprises the audience, who are expecting something modest, and they get a silly moment of grandiosity. I love those moments in my shows where the theatrics of the thing carry the audience away.

You’ve said audiences might never see the world the same way again. Without giving away the magic, what do you hope people carry with them after they leave the room?

I hope they leave feeling like the world has a crack in it – and maybe something beautiful is leaking through. That a tiny part of them is still spinning, still questioning.

I’m not trying to fool people – I’m trying to remind them that not everything has to make sense to be meaningful. If they walk out seeing the ordinary as a little more extraordinary… then the magic didn’t end when the lights went down.

James Macfarlane

James Macfarlane

Broadway Baby's Comedy Editor and Scotland Editor. In a previous life James did the same thing for ScotsGay. But we poached him.

Related to this article:

Lion King
Matilda
Titanique
Popular now
3

Mabel

Durham Fringe Festival
The Producers
Les Miserables
The Play That Goes Wrong