Reviews 2011
Reviews 2011
✭✭✭✭✩
by David Ben & Patrick Watson, directed by Patrick Watson
David Ben/Magicana/Luminato, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
June 10-16, 2011
Magician David Ben’s new show Natural Magick, takes its name from one of the older ways of describing illusions created solely by human abilities, specifically sleight-of-hand or prestidigitation. Those who have seen Ben’s previous shows from The Conjuror (1996) at the Shaw Festival to Tricks (2004), will know that Ben is a master of this branch of magic. While Natural Magick does not have an overall aesthetic concept as strong as that in The Conjuror or The Conjuror’s Suite (2000), the 90-minute show is still certain to surprise and delight.
The show gets off to a rather inauspicious start with a silent newsreel chronicling the dangers of bullet-catching including a necrology of magicians and their assistants who died performing this feat. It concluded with footage of a magician successfully performing the stunt in Fort Erie. The point of the film is likely to remind people that there was a time when magicians were treated like stars and their stunts were fodder for daily news. The audience, however, has come to see a live performance and while the film may create atmosphere is does dangerously delay the start of Ben’s performance. And, since he does not (luckily!) perform any bullet-catching, its focus is too tangential to the show.
Once Ben finally enters the fears that we have accidentally wandered into a film screen instead of a live show evaporate. What makes this show different from its predecessors its it presentation. David Rayfield’s simple but elegant set that looks like pages of a yellowed manuscript on which Cameron Davis projects images, sometimes moving, related to the illusion being performed--diagrams of the cup-and-balls trick, cherry blossoms for the fan and confetti trick or the portrait of a particular magician to whom Ben is paying an homage. This bright, colourful palette is quite the reverse of dark backgrounds usually favoured by magicians. While director Patrick Watson usually controls the effect of the projections on the performance, it does occasionally happen that the background is so patterned it is difficult to see clearly what Ben is doing. The same is true of John Lang’s music that captures the mood of the illusion, but very occasionally is too loud and make Ben difficult to hear. Other than this, Ben’s only prop is a stool that becomes a table when Julie Eng, his lovely assistant, brings out various tops for it.
Those who have been following Ben’s career will have seen most of the illusions he presents. There is the portrait of a person in numbers, the cup-and-balls, chosen cards rising from a bouquet of roses, the Chinese rings, the magical transfer of a handful of salt from one hand to another, dowsing blindfolded for chosen cards with a penknife, the regurgitation of 20 needles swallowed separately but now strung on thread and the dangerous-looking passage of tied thumbs back and forth through a samurai sword. All of these are performed so well those interested in magic never tire of seeing them. Ben’s final twist to the cup-and-balls and to the dowsing for cards is especially mind-boggling.
As far as I can tell, Ben has added three new tricks to his repertoire. One truly is a result of “natural magick” in that, as Ben himself says, the explanation is purely scientific. Nevertheless, when he removes the paper from the mouth of a overturned water-filled wineglass with goldfish swimming it, the effect is unbelievable even if the laws of nature are the cause. Another is an homage to a Peruvian magician known as “L’Homme masqué” in which a subject chosen from the audience somehow finds cards chosen from the audience one after the other in the same pocket of his suit. A third quite unusual illusion finds Ben added handfuls of three colours of dry sand to a bowl of inky water and then taking the handfuls out again dry leaving nothing in the bowl!
Ben does not cultivate the persona of the distant but dashing illusionist or the sly confidence man. Rather what endears him to audiences is a kind of studied nerdishness hat lowers our defenses and decreases our suspicions. Indeed, it’s for that very reason that very feat he accomplishes seems so remarkable. Watson has paced the show so well that our admiration for Ben’s prowess increases steadily throughout the show as we see that there is much more to this long-haired frock coated man than we first supposed.
It was especially heartening to see that the standing ovation for Ben was begun by a teenager who immediately leapt to his feet. “What,” I thought, “a teenager who has grown up in this era of CGI and high-speed electronics thrilled by such deliberately low-tech illusions? Maybe, there is hope for the future.”
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: David Ben. ©2011 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For Tickets, visit www.luminato.com.
2011-06-12
Natural Magick