Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

When Paul Aitchison performed this character magic show at the 2019 Fringe it was in the Caves, and didn’t attract much attention at all. Now he’s in one of the biggest rooms in Edinburgh, a cavernous, socially distanced conference hall in the EICC – and it’s the wrong venue for him.

It’s certainly too vast for his close-up magic. There’s a screen and projector, but it’s too low-quality for the job. Sometimes you can barely see what the sleight-of-hand was supposed to achieve, let alone whether he pulled it off successfully

And it’s also too big a space for his performance. Though some of his creations are supposed to have arena-filling swagger, he’s a lower-key actor than that. The struggling mid-bill cruise-ship conjurors are a better fit for the energy of his performance.

These varied personalities are all on the same bill because this is a competition final, run by the Magic Ring. Our host is Reg Kettle, a Northern working men’s club magician in a green fez. He’s got terrible catchphrases, a swanee whistle sound effect and gags borrowed from Bob Monkhouse. More inventively he has a nice line in malapropisms in his misguided attempts to add a bit of class to proceedings. 

The competitors kick off with the hip rock-and-roll street mind reader Zantoo Thorne – think early David Blaine at his most narcissistic – who executes some impressive feats of mentalism, or ‘brain fondling’, as he amusingly calls it. Then there’s Klaus Fantastich, a camp German (that’s about as far as the characterisation stretches); and Colin, who in the 1970s was half of a TV double act with wife Carol. She has just left him, leaving this tragic figure to do a cup-and-ball trick we can barely see and a more impressive mind-reading stunt with a deck of cards.

None of the personas are especially three-dimensional, but the conceit allows Aitchison to inject some tonal variety into his tricks, which are standard fare, but well-executed. The show’s amusing, but these characters are too restrained to let rip into the hilarious.

The competition element provides the finale, naturally with a magic twist, which is what the show requires, even if - again - its effect doesn’t match the scale of the room. 

• Could It Be Magic? is at the Pleasance at EICC at 8pm until August 29

Review date: 18 Aug 2021
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Pleasance @ EICC