Ben Hart Triumphs At Edinburgh Fringe

I'm at the Fringe festival as I write this post on the morning that it's going out to readers. It's my final day, and as soon as I hit publish, I'll be walking over to see Mario The Maker's show at 11:00 (he was brilliant at Blackpool this year), and then it's off to the airport to head off.

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is an annual month-long festival packed with comedy, circus, theatre, music and too much magic. Every pub, classroom, office and gym across the city transforms into a makeshift venue for thousands of shows and hundreds of thousands of eager audiences. 856,541 tickets were sold at the festival in 2019.

Funnily enough, Fringe magicians don't see much value in getting written about by a publication for magicians. I offered a few of them the option to write about their show in One Ahead during the run-up to the festival. All of them declined because, as it turns out, magicians are not their target audience.

I caught a bunch of shows and sadly missed a bunch I didn't have time to see. Notably, Dom Chambers and Charlie Caper have received rave reviews, and I would have loved to catch their shows. But what were some of the shows I saw, and what can magicians learn from what worked and what didn't work so well?

The first show I caught was Tom Crosbie, the performing nerd. What's so refreshing about Tom is that he's wholly carved out a niche and is a performing nerd (not a magician). He presents his impossible feats as acts of nerdy hard work – memory and puzzle-solving abilities like no other.

The other fantastic thing Tom does, without spoiling the show, is the best pre-show warm-up I saw this year at the Fringe. Something rather specific and on-brand to him happens as the audience enters the venue, involving the screen and random audience members. It works brilliantly to warm the crowd, unite them as one big team, and introduce the act.

Tom employed some brilliant subtleties and variations, and I'll always be such a fan of his special blank Rubik's cube trick. But bizarrely, there was one moment that stood out to me that wasn't at all magic related. At the top of his show, Tom makes a straightforward announcement that welcomes everyone in the audience, including neurodivergent people, and it's rather splendid. You feel the audience take a big breath and sit back, knowing it's a safe space and no one will be picked on for any ticks, fidgets, outbursts, or simply needing to leave.

And this became a bit of a theme for me throughout The Fringe. With so many shows to choose from and so many of them booked on a whim — my Dad accidentally booked a shock comedy circus and was upset afterwards that it was, in fact, a shock comedy circus – the shows with a welcome moment at the top of the shows do much better. It only needs to be a summary of what to expect and a reminder of the show you're about to see.

In the shows without this concise introduction, you can see the audience spend the first ten minutes coming to terms with what they're seeing and trying to establish what they've booked to see. Something as simple as Welcome to X show, over the next fifty minutes, you'll see X, Y, Z, and a punch line, is all you need.

Kat Hudson and her husband Alan teamed up this year for a show titled "Married at First Sleight". I bloody loved it. Felt oddly refreshing to watch a double act with natural chemistry and a dynamic I haven't seen before on stage for magic. The thing I felt most throughout the Hudsons' show was how much they seemed to enjoy themselves together.

I'm not used to seeing impressive magic in comedy acts, but I think their show involved some of the most magician-fooling effects I've seen all week, and they totally embraced the fact that both of them could play roles in every method. I think that made the methods so hard to follow as a magician in the audience. What you're used to seeing one magician do, is suddenly getting split between two talented magicians, and it ends up impossible to keep up. Eventually, your magician mind gives up, and you enjoy the show.

I can't say I expected to hear quite so many jokes about swinging in one show. In fact, there are so many swinging jokes that eventually, it reaches the point where you leave 100% convinced that the show was great fun, filled with strong magic and that Alan Hudson and Kat Hudson definitely swing at the weekends.

Tom Brace was great fun, though a little full-on, with an audience packed to the brim with young kids. I've never seen a family show with such Derren Brown-level thinking and plot weaved between tricks with children's toys, origami predictions, and Nerf gun magic routines. It made you wonder why we do not apply that level of thinking to all kinds of magic – why do most reserve that thinking for big theatre mentalism shows?

Bizarrely, the main thing I walked away with after watching Brace's show had less to do with him and more with where I sat in the audience. In front of me was a family of four, two boys, a girl and their Dad – all under ten (besides the Dad, obviously). The two boys were utterly swept up trying to figure out the tricks for the entire show, and the walk out of the venue afterwards. They were having the time of their lives with their Dad, noting things they'd seen and trading notes.

It was lovely and so exciting to be around. It had me really questioning this notion most magicians have of audience members who try to work out how the tricks are done. Magicians often dislike these people for ruining the magic or not letting themselves enjoy the show as intended.

I can tell you these boys absolutely loved the magic, even if their joy came from trying to work out how it was all done. I can confidently say that for weeks, maybe months, or years, that family will be sitting around the dinner table trying to work out how Tom Brace changed the name on the poster for his show.

Perhaps magicians shouldn't be so quick to trivialise the spectators who are keen to figure out their tricks. Maybe that's part of the magic. After all, it's how most magicians started – wanting to know how a trick was done.

I caught Luke Osey on stage in his solo Free Fringe show and his new paid team show called 1 Hour of Insane Magic alongside Cameron Gibson and Elliot Bibby. The magic in Luke's solo show was incredibly strong, and the entire time, I kept thinking about the young comics I saw at the Fringe when I began coming here eight years ago. All of the comics I saw who were Luke's age are now on television most weeks. Luke's trajectory is strong, and it's a tangible reminder to put yourself out there and start performing soon and often.

His drive reminds me of an early Justin Willman. There are so many magicians I speak to who say they want to be successful and want to improve their act, but when I ask them how often they perform it, their mind goes blank. Even without the Fringe, Luke is off performing segments of his show on comedy nights across the city every week. He's attacking a magic career like a comedian, and it shows.

When I worked with Justin Willman writing his Netflix series, I was always in awe of the comedians who worked on the show, too. After writing with us, almost all of them would spend most of their nights driving around Los Angeles and appearing to do five-minute slots in different comedy shows to improve their act.

Comedians know they need an audience to perform their act – magicians don't always share this belief, so you end up with many acts that, even in front of an audience, feel like an act built for the magician's living room.

1 Hour of Insane Magic's Elliot Bibby had one trick that stole the show with a credit card. I don't think I've experienced quite so many audience gasps for one trick before. I could see it disarm multiple sceptics in the room, and it might be the trick of the Fringe in my eyes purely in terms of the reaction from the crowd. It's pop music, if pop music was a magic trick, and ticks all the boxes to be an audience favourite they'll be talking about for months to come.

1 Hour of Insane Magic has a sold-out run, and I could write several posts about the genius of their marketing that made it happen before the Fringe even began. It's no coincidence their show appears at the top of the programme. These magicians are playing by the 80/20 rule and being smart with their decisions, knowing 20% of those decisions will account for 100% of the ticket sales.

Okay – Ben Hart was fucking spectacular.

My god. World-class.

I've seen his shows before at the Fringe, but this was on another level. Man, it was about a hundred levels up from what has always been a Fringe staple magic show. But why was it so good, and what can magicians learn from it...

The show was an absolute delight with such devilishly simple magic tricks and showmanship that was just incredible. Ben had the audience in the palm of his hand. It felt like he literally twitched his hand at the end, and everyone immediately stood up for a standing ovation – the only one I had seen at any magic show.

I cannot stress how good his show was. The lighting cues, the props, the sounds, the storytelling – the venue was perfect for it, too. It's clear that of all the magicians I saw, Ben has a strong passion for theatre, and he's studied the art and craft of showmanship. Every magician should study Hart's ability to command an audience – changing his tone, gesturing, speeding up, and leaping back up onto the stage to cue all sorts of reactions.

The way the group I saw described it was like this: In most shows at the Fringe, you feel like you're seeing something that's been performed a bunch in someone's front room, suddenly on a bigger stage. But with Hart's show, you feel like you're seeing a vast theatre piece squeezed effortlessly into a pretty circus tent. You feel lucky to see the show in what feels like an intimate 300-seat venue – knowing this show could easily be in a 3,000-seat theatre.

And he fills the venue with lighting, storytelling, sound and movement – not with giant props and illusions. It was clear watching Hart's show and looking around at the audience – Ben Hart will be the magician of our generation.

His show would work perfectly on any significant stage or Netflix special. I cannot encourage you enough to see it on tour, forget about magic and study the stagecraft, and invest in your skills. Yes, the magic in Ben's show was simple and fooling and the stuff that would delight most magicians – but he could strike a pose, hold up his hand, and speed up his voice to put the audience at ease and enjoy the magic that stole the Fringe for me.