THE ART OF ILLUSION

About the show

“It’s a matter of perception. The hands of time turn at the same speed for everyone. Yet a child waits what seems to be an eternity for summer, whilst an old man watches a year pass in the blinking of an eye” In 1984, as the France vs Yugoslavia match unfolds on TV, a man meets a woman in a Parisian café. He is returning a bag that she lost in the metro, but he doesn’t tell her he stole it… Instead, he tells her the story of Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, watchmaker, inventor, and master magician of the 19th century. Together they set out to find a vanished theatre beneath a bank vault in the Boulevard des Italiens, to break into a museum in the Trocadero, to uncover the mystery of the Mechanical Turk, to witness the birth of the kinetograph… and to delve ever deeper into the Art of Illusion. Alexis Michalik’s The Art of Illusion won three Molière Awards when it premiered in 2014. A Franco-British actor, writer and director, his other plays include Le Porteur d’histoire, Edmond and Intra Muros. Waleed Akhtar’s writing for theatre includes The P Word (Bush) and Kabul Goes Pop: Music Television Afghanistan (Brixton House/Mercury Theatre and HighTide). Tom Jackson Greaves is a director and choreographer whose recent work has included Whistle down the Wind; The Jungle Book (Watermill); Rent (Hope Mill Theatre); Amelie (West End) and Priscilla Queen of the Desert (UK tour).