Heist. It’s one word, but it comes with expectations. A plan. A target. A getaway. Perhaps a balaclava or two. Yet, as ever with the magician, storytelling tactician and doyen of deception, Chris Cook, what you expect is not necessarily what you get.
Accompanying his companion show FAKE, Cook offers a Free Fringe indulgence with Heist: How to Steal a Masterpiece. It’s a pay-what-you-want, hour-long, laugh-out-loud, perma-smile tour de force in which the audience is recruited as accomplices and Cook becomes the maestro of the art of diversion.
There are tricks, of course. There is misdirection. There are apparently impossible moments that leave you wondering whether you have just witnessed something remarkable or simply failed spectacularly to notice what was happening under your nose – or your seat.
But Heist is more than a string of magic tricks. Cook folds the illusions into a story, taking us through the familiar tropes of the great robbery while continually playing with our expectations. Just when you think you know what is coming next… well, you probably don’t.
In the tradition of the magician, there is an unseen hand in plain sight. There is another magician of sorts at work here. While Cook is the man in the spotlight, producer Rhys Williamson is the driving force behind the presentation, helping turn the performer’s prodigious talent into a coherent theatrical experience. It is a decade-honed partnership that reminds us that even the most apparently effortless magic requires an awful lot of work behind the curtain.
Williamson’s role is more than simply keeping the show on the road. He and Cook have developed Heist as a genuine theatrical piece, working out how the audience, sound, atmosphere and timing all contribute to the deception. The result is a show that feels deliberately fluid and unpredictable – which, for a production about pulling off an impossible theft, is precisely the point. Williamson may spend much of the performance out of sight, but his fingerprints are all over it.
That sense of effortless control extends to the venue itself. The exquisite Victorian splendour of the Voodoo Rooms makes a suitably intriguing setting – although, given the name, perhaps we should already have suspected that things might not be quite what they seem. That, after all, is very much the Heist philosophy.
Cook knows precisely where to point your attention – and, more importantly, where not to. Williamson creates the theatrical cloak that shrouds the sleight of hand. For sixty minutes, they have us laughing, guessing, doubting and, occasionally, feeling rather foolish. You’ll never look at a Rubik’s Cube the same way again. That is the joy of it. We willingly hand over our attention to these masters of diversion and discover that being fooled can be enormous fun. Heist: How to Steal a Masterpiece is clever, charming and gloriously mischievous.
