ABSTRACT
I have long since been enthralled by magicians. I watched the charming David Nixon on TV (who introduced the glove puppet Basil Brush to the unwitting world), and loved the ease of his performance. I was never keen on the over-glitzy presentation of Siegfried and Roy (their magic inseparable from a distracting camp element), or the smarm of David Blaine, as these performers tend to have too much show, with plastic assistants and unnecessary technology, detracting from the trick itself. A magician’s audience know that a woman is never likely to be actually sawn in half; they like to fl irt with believing but no more. There is a complicity. If a woman was sawn in half, the whole event would lose its point and the woman her life! We are willing to be tricked and fooled, and the more fooled we are the more satisfying the experience. What makes the trick better is the element of doubt, where the audience’s perception of what is real and what is not is pushed to an uncomfortable limit.
