It’s not the first time Chris Cook has been to the Fringe. Then again, this is a show about fakery, imitation and the deceptively difficult business of telling the real from the counterfeit. “It’s pretty, but is it art?” asks Cook, echoing Kipling’s most famous quote, that is rarely attributed to Rudyard. In doing so, he sets up the question at the heart of Fake. From there, the award-winning magician, storyteller and theatre-maker takes us on a winding journey through Dutch Masters, art forgery, wartime deception and the curious world of professional trickery.
At its centre is Hans van Meegeren, the Dutch painter whose astonishingly convincing Vermeer forgeries fooled some of the art world’s leading experts, and also deceived his contemporary, a little known Austrian colourist by the name of Adolf Hitler. Cook’s story also introduces us to Chung Ling Soo, the Victorian-era American magician who successfully reinvented himself as a mysterious Chinese performer – until a fatal bullet-catching trick exposed the truth. Fear not for the plot, we’re not giving it away, but suffice to say, if you know a thing or two about art, you’ll be asking yourself the questions just before Cook uncannily answers them, as if he’s inside your head.
Fake through is far from a double dose of Dutch culture. Cook is more at home on Coniston Water than the Zuider Zee (that fake lake in the middle of North Holland that isn’t there any more – now you see it, and all that). He is an accomplished entertainer, effortlessly switching between history, comedy, storytelling and some genuinely breathtaking magic. His witty asides reward those who know their Vermeer from their van Meegeren, while amusing those who don’t. That ability to entertain everyone in the room is no trivial trick in itself.
The magic is particularly effective because Cook engages his audience as collaborators rather than passive spectators. We are invited to participate, to believe and, occasionally, to wonder whether we have just been thoroughly conned.
That, one and all, is where we roll up roll up. Fake becomes more than a magic show. Van Meegeren’s paintings may have been forgeries, but if experts believed them to be genuine and audiences found them beautiful, what exactly made them fake? Kipling might have asked that too. Cook draws a neat parallel with magic. The illusion may not be real, but the audience’s experience of it certainly is.
Cook is a confident performer with a natural stage presence, and the storytelling is matched by sleight of hand that ranges from subtle to spectacular. By the finale, you may be left questioning not only what you have witnessed, but why you were so willing to believe it.
Chris Cook does anything but flatter to deceive.
