Dundee Fringe 2025
Four Magicians
Genre: Comedy, Magic, Magic and Mentalism
Venue: Sweet Venues at the Keiller Centre
Festival: Dundee Fringe
Low Down
A comedic journey through an incredible spectrum of magic mind reading and prestidigitation
Review
A large audience, a small stage with a few props, and the four magicians Smith & Burns, Eoin Smith and James Dickson are seated the stage. The audience is treated to a cavalcade of magical performance that is as much comedy as it is magic. We are brought along in a series of magical feats, with a healthy dose of audience participation. The staging is excellent; the audience are seated eye to eye with the magicians, there seems very little room to hide anything, which makes the magic all the more real. Each of the tricks showcases different magical feats, illusion, sleight of hand, mentalism and more. The wide spectrum of magical arts represented here is impressive. There is a comedic bent to each trick – back and forth banter, stand up, and sketch comedy all feature. This show takes the audience from laughter, to shock with a touch of awe then back to funny, only to be once again mesmerised and left aghast with wonderment and laughter. The opening trick the magicians perform is almost breathtakingly blasé in it’s delivery. The audience are brought in with genuinely great comedy timing and self-deprecating family friendly jokes, which makes the very intimate space feel warm and welcoming without being overwhelming. Having four magicians feels very much like a luxury and they used their different styles to great effect by changing which magicians were performing like a tag team wrestling match of magic. This really kept the audience engaged, it also makes the show naturally fast paced which allows them to fit a surprising number of tricks into the act. They have clearly given great consideration to the structure of the show, and the order of the pieces feels deliberate and comes together almost like a puzzle. They gel well as a quartet and the performance feels smooth and professional even when things go awry. There was a very tense moment in the middle of trick with an audience member on stage, when a prop came apart, this was seamlessly incorporated into the act leaving us questioning whether it was in fact always part of the show. The magicians always remain seated at one side of the stage when not directly involved in the trick happening, this is an excellent touch and I felt that the magicians watching were enjoying the performance just as much as the audience was. It also led to some genuinely touching moments. During one fantastic, and slightly scary trick, one of the magicians was weaving a tale involving dangerous artifact of mystical origins, he was about to produce this artifact and a child in the audience was getting upset, in part due to the convincing delivery, one of the observing magicians seeing this left his seat and went to sit with the child and put them at their ease, a different kind of magic.
The whole show is very funny, the humour is very well judged for the family audience, jokes walk that tough line between adult and kids’ comedy, the younger members of the audience are laughing just as hard as the grown-ups. Each component of the show is as much a sketch or a scene as it is a magical feat, and this serves to elevate it. The magicians have genuinely great comedy timing; the jokes and laughter put the audience at their ease which serves to make the prestidigitation more astounding. The performance was very well done, there really was nowhere to hide in this venue, but the mystery was preserved. I have no idea how they did any of it, the opening trick involved a sword and though it all went well I am very glad I was not the audience member chosen to help, there was one particular trick involving a can of peas that really had me scratching my head and applauding loudly, and the teleportation must be seen to be believed.
