Magic Goes Wrong
The buzz around The Play That Goes Wrong first started when the show appeared at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013, tucked discreetly into one of the Pleasance’s myriad performance spaces. With my unerring instinct for the next big thing, I dismissed it out of hand, deciding instead (I just looked it up) to go see a performance artist attach thousands of clothes pegs to herself. Since then, little has been heard from the peg woman, while Mischief Theatre has gone from strength to strength, becoming one of the biggest success stories in theatre.
This latest incarnation involves magic, or at least the mismanagement of tricks, and has been created in partnership with those other lords of misrule, Penn and Teller. As such, it’s a curious hybrid of chaos and competence, with the narrative still having something of the university review about it, notwithstanding the faultless execution of set piece magical stunts. It’s a mix that doesn’t always work, certainly in terms of its inherent logic, but then I can’t imagine many people come along to a Mischief show looking for a coherent narrative.
The central conceit is that a bunch of third rate magicians have come together to put on a benefit performance, in aid of those poor unfortunates that have fallen on their magical swords. As such, it’s really a series of standalone sketches, with some working better than others. Sam Hill does a fine job of holding the shambolic evening together, striking just the right balance between desperation and indignation. If this was a show had been performed by muppets (to which there is more than a passing similarity) his part of Sophisticato would have been played by Kermit.
Roby Fairbairn cuts a dash as the Mind Mangler, making the most of what was essentially one joke –he can’t read minds –offering up the most rounded performance of the evening, and helped in no small part by his relationship with the man from the audience, played by Daniel Anthony. They were the closest we got to seeing the men behind the masks, and went some way to fleshing out characters that were otherwise little more than caricatures. That said, Keifer Moriarty’s Blade was a very good caricature. With a clear nod to the self-regarding narcissism of David Blaine, his comedy business was accomplished and assured. The man was a fool, but an excellent fool. Sadly, the same can’t be said for the German contortionists. Jocelyn Prah and Chloe Tannenbaum did the best with what they were given, but there’s a fine line between clever stupid and stupid stupid – one that their slapstick routine frequently crossed. It is surely significant that these performers didn’t benefit from a set piece magic act. Even the Mind Mangler got to avoid a broken bottle injury, whereas the “acrobats” had to be content with mucking about with dummies.
And therein lies the rub. For all the energy and enthusiasm of the cast, the highlight of each segment was usually a bit ofstraight forward, quite well done, magic. The influence of Penn and Teller was obvious – indeed a couple of the routines appear to have been taken verbatim from their playbook – and while I enjoyed the illusions, they did seem to spring out of nowhere. An obvious exception to this was a hilarious, if gruesome, trick involving the incompetent use of a circularsaw, but this only served to highlight the disconnect between the uselessness of the characters and the skills of the performers. Too often, one had to peer through the nonsense, to even notice how clever a trick had been.
I do wish Mischief Theatre would try just that little bit harder to deliver what they are clearly capable of providing, if only they’d reflect more on the quality of the writing. This was a show that went on for two hours. If they had kept in all the magic, and trimmed down some of the pratting about, it would have been immeasurably improved. Granted, along the way we got some great gags, not least the will he/won’t he appearance of Derren Brown, the cameraman who got his comeuppance, and some inspired heckling from the audience. It was, however, telling that in the grand finale all presence of incompetence was swept away, with the cast offered up a spell-binding magical finale.
