Can a magician’s hand really be faster than the human eye? Paul Dabek may well use that serious question as an excuse for a simple physical joke, but by the end of this excellent show his audience is left in no doubt that it must be — there’s no other possible explanation for the deceptively simple tricks with hankies, ropes and £10 notes that Dabek performs with an almost surreal disdain.
Not that he’s unaware of his own talent: ‘It’s not much, but I think I do it quite well,’ he says at one point, while later bemoaning one particular prop for costing £20 and only doing one thing. It’s all part of Dabek’s genuine charm, not least when a lack of immediate audience reaction after one trick suggests to him that maybe spending five years of his life practising it wasn’t really balanced by one man clapping on his own.
Yet if the tricks are deceptively simple, so is their presentation. Dabek belongs to the more forceful, spikey tradition when compared with some of the other magicians currently in Edinburgh — it’s no surprise that Paul Daniels gets a name-check (though so does Derren Brown, which would seem to be a common habit among magicians currently in Edinburgh). Despite this, his rapport with the audience is immediate and good; within seconds of being in his company, you know you’re in for a good time.
From attempting ‘extreme balloon modelling’ with his thumbs tied together with pipe cleaners to stork-like physical contortions, Dabek commands the stage and leaves his audience both amazed and entertained.
He also has the unforced ability to return to certain audience members throughout the show, building seemingly one-off humorous asides into proper, full-blown riffs that have his audience in stitches. Talking of the crowd, woe betide any audience member brought to the stage (to act as his ‘glamorous assistant’) who makes the mistake of standing in his key light. Or, indeed, he who risks heckling from the back of the room. If Dabek’s hands are faster than the human eye, so are his witty comebacks.
