Now You See Me Live at the London Coliseum – review

We live in an age that has, on the whole, decided it cannot be fooled. We carry the sum of human knowledge in our pockets, we have watched every trick explained on a hundred YouTube channels, and we walk into a theatre armed with the quiet certainty that we know how it is done, even when we don’t. Which makes what unfolded at the London Coliseum this week all the more remarkable. For two hours, a house full of hardened modern sceptics gasped, flinched and applauded like children. That, in itself, is a kind of magic.

Now You See Me Live borrows its name, and a sliver of its branding, from the hit film franchise about a quartet of illusionists known as “The Four Horsemen”. The connection, it must be said, is slender to the point of being decorative. Four leading performers are billed under the Horsemen banner and that, more or less, is where the association ends. There is no heist, no narrative, no grand con being pulled on stage or auditorium. What you get instead is a pure showcase: a succession of world-class magicians doing what they do best, unencumbered by plot. Purists of the film may feel a little short-changed by the framing. Everyone else will be far too busy being astonished to care.

And astonished you will be. The four principals each bring a distinct discipline to the evening, and all four are, quite simply, exceptional. Andrew Basso takes on the illusion that has terrified performers since Houdini first devised it, the Chinese Water Torture Cell, lowered upside down into a locked tank of water with the clock and his own lungs against him. Gabriella Lester escapes from a safe rigged to explode, a sequence engineered for maximum jeopardy. Both are genuine feats of nerve and craft, and both, on the night, drew the sharp collective intake of breath that only live danger can produce.

If there is a single moment to send you home talking, though, it belongs to one of the show’s “next generation” performers. Eden Choi does something with a deck of playing cards that defies not just explanation but physics, cards cascading from his hands in an apparently bottomless torrent, more and more of them, long past the point where any reasonable person would expect the supply to run dry. It is close-up sleight of hand blown up to arena scale, and it is quietly the most jaw-dropping thing in the building. No fire, no fanfare, just impossible skill in plain sight.

The evening’s other star wears no cape at all. Hugo Mercier Bosseny’s set and lighting design is a triumph, conjuring a sleek, futuristic world of shifting light and shadow that gives the whole show a sense of scale and occasion the Coliseum deserves. Crucially, the design does more than decorate. Again and again it works hand in glove with the illusions themselves, shaping and concealing and misdirecting, so that the look of the piece and its mechanics feel like a single, unified act of stagecraft. It would be easy to let the tricks do all the talking and dress the stage in black. This production understands that how a thing is lit is part of how a thing is done.

If anything stops the evening tipping over into an unqualified five stars, it is a matter of tone rather than talent. There is a fine art to the theatrical build before an illusion, the drawing out of tension, the sense that something might genuinely go wrong. Handled well, it is the difference between a trick and a spectacle. Handled a shade too enthusiastically, it starts to feel like ham. In one or two places, notably around Basso’s water escape and Lester’s exploding safe, the pre-amble is laid on a touch thick, the peril signalled so heavily that it nudges towards the melodramatic. It is a minor quibble, and the crowd laps it up regardless. But it takes a little of the edge off illusions that were more than capable of speaking for themselves.

None of which should obscure the plain fact of the matter, which is that this is a hugely entertaining night out. It knows exactly what it is, it does not pretend to be more, and it delivers wonder with real generosity and craft. On a more forgiving night, the fifth star would be no stretch at all. The talent on that stage certainly earns it.