Part of
the attraction of seeing magic tricks performed well – beyond the sheer
spectacle – is trying to work out how they’re done. So
Darkly humorous, Het Filiaal’s production is an engaging, entertaining and never-ostentatious production which nevertheless offers moments of eerie ambiguity.
The Great Illusionist, however, is not the white rabbit; it’s the stage name applied to a magician who, from when he was a little boy, we’re told wanted to learn the trick of disappearing. Ironically enough, in order to achieve this, he has to spend his life learning the craft of magic and eventually becomes the world’s most famous magician – wowing audiences from London to Las Vegas with all the showbiz glitter and acumen he can muster. His story is delivered by Graus, director Monique Corver and musican/composer Gábor Tarján through a mixture of music, songs and magic tricks – some primarily there as a spectacle in their own right (with, in one case, effective lighting to recreate the look of early cinema), others just simple small parlour tricks used as an inventive narrative tool to help tell the story of the little boy who wanted to disappear.
Darkly humorous, Het Filiaal’s production is an engaging, entertaining and never-ostentatious production which nevertheless offers moments of eerie ambiguity. Perhaps most impressively, though, while the show makes some effort to remind us that stage magic is all about psychology and “brain science”, it also reminds us all that – despite us wanting to know how the tricks are done – at some level we also want to be deceived, so that we can still believe in the magic.
