Feature in The Guardian from 2011. Interviewed by Maddy Costa, he talks about Matilda, Ghost The Musical and when when things don’t quite go to plan!   Read Matilda’s master illusionist.

The post “Matilda’s master illusionist” interviewed in The Guardian appeared first on Paul Kieve.

Hollywood has turned the special effect into a birthright for a generation of movie-goers. “How did they do that?” is no longer a question you hear in the multiplex. In the theatre it’s another thing entirely. Whatever the reception for the show in its entirety, the musical version of The Lord of the Rings did contain one remarkable illusion in which Bilbo Baggins vanished before the audience’s eyes. Even Derren Brown had no idea how it was achieved. The architect of that effect, and countless others in a long career in the theatre, was Paul Kieve.

Kieve’s newest challenge is also his most outlandish yet. Ghost, the film which starred Patrick Swayze as a murder victim who talks to his widowed wife (Demi Moore) through a medium played by Whoopi Goldberg, has been turned into a musical. The film version had visual effects galore to establish that Swayze’s character was no longer of this world. His hand passed through objects he couldn’t pick up. He could shove a coin invisibly up a vertical surface. How do you do that on stage? It’s not the first time director Matthew Warchus has called Kieve. They first worked together on Volpone at the National Theatre in 1995.

If such a thing as a conventional illusionist’s career exists, Kieve (b 1967) has not had one. Growing up in Essex, he was obsessed with tricks and he got his first break at 16 when he was hired to do a card trick on Sade’s debut video “Your Love is King”. At 19 he formed a double act called the Zodiac Brothers, which lasted for four years and took him all over the world. After an acrimonious split, Kieve conceived a plan to escape to university, but made it as far as the Theatre Royal Stratford East where he was asked to produce the effects for The Invisible Man. He has been working in theatre ever since.

At Kieve’s home in Hackney, the shelves of a tall cabinet groan with books about magic. One of those books is by Kieve himself. Although he all but made himself disappear when he joined the theatre, he wrote a history of magic in 1997 which took him out on the book festival circuit. His Hocus Pocus lecture turned into a small portable show which he sometimes still produces from the hat. But mostly he is in hiding. Other invisible gigs include being the only actual magician ever to work on the set of a Harry Potter film. Now you see him, now you don’t. He talks to theartsdesk.

JASPER REES: We need to establish the parameters with interviewing a magician. All the questions you really want to ask won’t get answered. Do you find that a frustration, that you’re not allowed to talk about the tricks of the trade?

PAUL KIEVE: There’s a couple of points there. I suppose I am a magician or an illusionist. I am in the magic circle but of course I spend most of my time on the backstage side of it. I’m creating stuff that is used in theatre and films. I think that’s not a coincidence and it ties in with this thing about secrecy and this seemingly anachronistic idea that you can keep things secret, which you can’t really any more with the internet. I don’t bow to any of its rules at all. In a way I reveal secrets all the time. When I work on a show I’m having to share and explore the methods with dozens of people in order to make the thing work. I suppose that’s what allows me to do, therefore, things that haven’t been done or seen or are more exciting if I was doing my own act. A friend of mine in America says, “Magicians guard an empty safe,” which I think is true. When you look at the secrets on their own they’re not terribly exciting. It’s not nuclear science. We’re talking about some quite simple things. In a sense my job is panning for gold where you’re trying to make it simpler, extract extraneous stuff, not overcomplicate it and make the method as simple as possible in order to make the effect.

The thing about magic that is difficult to grasp is the effect that sometimes quite simple methods can have if they’re placed in the right way. Taking a very classic illusion, sawing a woman in half, it just happened to catch the public imagination at that time because of the suffragettes. Something about that plot people wanted to see. Nowadays you can’t do the same thing but if you put magic into a story and people care about the story then I think it makes it a whole other thing. Magic can be so removed it can, at its worst, become a puzzle. When it’s part of a story at the end it shouldn’t matter about the methods or how they’re being done. Having said that, I’m not going to tell you how they’re being done.

When I explain to the cast and crew that the idea is to keep the secrets within the show, sometimes they’re like, “Oh God, what’s this guy going on about?” And then by the time we’ve finished weeks later perfecting this bloody thing after spending hours and hours getting the lighting right and the timing and the script, they understand why it’s not just a matter of going, “Oh, it’s a bit of thread that does this from the side.”

Can you do much more because of computers and more sophisticated lighting as when you did The Invisible Man?

When I did Invisible Man at Stratford in the early Nineties we didn’t necessarily even have the budgets for the big lighting rigs then. Lighting technology has made things possible in a precise way that wouldn’t have been possible when I was starting out. I don’t think it makes them simpler. It means that I can be a bit bolder with how things are lit. It’s a bit of a mixed blessing because some of these moving lights have much more of a tendency to blow, much more than the static lights. Originally you’d have to hang up a light for a special and that would be the only time it would be nice, whereas now they’re used all the way through the show. There’s more of a chance that when they get to your bit, which is the 190th cue, they’re not actually there. That can be a different problem. But in terms of technology, I’m using everything from absolute state-of-the-art automation and lighting to stuff that originated in the 1860s. I’m constantly looking back in order to get stuff that hasn’t been seen now. Some of the effects in Ghost have been tremendously exciting to develop because some of them have not been seen in any form for over 100 years. And the form that they are in in Ghost is very, very different.

Are you able to supply an example?

We do things that I would say are in the realm of optical magic. If you think of an actor like Paul Daniels, they’re doing comedy magic and card tricks which is all fantastic stuff. But in a magic trick you rarely see things happen before your eyes. A lot of what happens is suggested. A lot of magic is about imagining what’s happening. Even the original version of sawing a woman in half, the girl was tied into a box and roped in and the ropes were held outside the box and the box was sawn through with a giant saw. The point the saw went through the box you couldn’t see any of the woman. You knew she was in there and you had seen the ropes tied around her wrists so what was happening? Was the woman being sawn in half in your imagination? All the information led up to the fact that there was only one conclusion: it’s either impossible or there’s a girl sawn in half.

Some of the things we do in Ghost you actually see the thing happen. You see someone materialise in front of your eyes and you see someone try and pick up an object and their hand does pass through it. You really see somebody passing through a door that’s solid and you’ve seen it’s solid earlier in the scene. If you’re doing that in a magic show, for example, walking through a door, you’d get two people up from the audience and they’d examine the door and they’d put the door in a big frame and you’d probably hang a curtain over it so you could see the outside of the door but not the bit you walk through, and you’d go through the middle of it and you’d take the prop away and they would come in and the door would still be solid. The point when you walk through the door, you wouldn’t actually see the flesh passing through the door. That’s a film effect. You don’t do that on stage. What we’ve tried to do in Ghost is to deliver those things as if you’re seeing them in a film. And not to be clever about it, but to make it a seamless part of the storytelling. But what’s surprising is you can do things that you see absolutely every day in films without any question. You don’t even think about it because you know it’s an effect and it’s just part of the storytelling. You do exactly those same things on stage and people at best are astonished and amazed and bewildered, at worst totally jolted out of the story because you’re suddenly setting up a big puzzle in the middle of the storytelling.

‘The really frustrating thing is the last thing it is is magic. It’s absolutely the most nitty-gritty technical annoying thing’

So it’s a constant balance and it’s what I discuss a lot with Matthew Warchus. I always say it’s when you play your aces. Bruce Joel Rubin, an amazing guy who wrote the movie, had basically transferred the movie script so every time Sam walked past something his hand went through it. You could do that. I wanted to but you also wouldn’t want to. If by the time he walked through the door he’s already put his hand through five objects and every person he walks past he walks through, then there’s no impact at that moment. But in a film you wouldn’t play it like that. In theatre you have to be aware that people are seeing it live. It’s working out when things have an emotional impact as well. I don’t think I’m giving too much away to say that the whole set has been designed around these optical effects which are extraordinarily difficult to achieve. In theatre you would never go, “In order to make this guy vanish in a way that’s never been seen before in a show, we’ve got to do everything else backwards from it.” “How long’s that effect going to last?” “Two seconds.”

So you work backwards from when Sam disappears?

There are six or eight moments. The thing which defines Ghost which is very interesting for me as a challenge is that these magic points sit absolutely on key story points. They are not arbitrary. When he learns to go through a door it’s really key to the story. When he can’t pick up an object and learns how to push things, that becomes a fundamental part of the story. If you were doing the radio version you would be left with those points. One of the things that’s funny about the transposition from film to stage is that in a film, because the ghost is invisible to everyone but only audible to the medium, in the film you are constantly seeing Patrick Swayze, and then in the next moment you don’t see him, so you are switching points of view. Famously when he pushes the penny up the door to prove he’s there. What the audiences sees is him pushing the penny up the door and then just for a split second you see Demi Moore’s point of view, the coin floating across the air and then you see it back in his hand. Really what that is about is intention, his face trying to convince her. We set this up in a workshop and realised we could get this coin floating up the door, but it just looked like a magic trick, so we had to come up with a whole other way of delivering that story because it just wasn’t right. We couldn’t switch points of view. There are certain things that play in our favour in the way the story has been constructed but certainly we’ve had to strip a lot of the effects out.
‘I did magic in the Duke of Edinburgh award and built a box at school for cutting my sister in half’

Were you Matthew Warchus’s first call?

I’ve worked with Matthew on many, many shows since 1995 on Volpone at the National, but the bigger thing was Peter Pan at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, which was an epic production. I think they had to run it for two years because it cost so much money. I think I was originally introduced to Matthew by Simon Russell Beale at the National when we were doing Volpone in 1995. He came to me very early on in the process. I remember saying to Matthew on Peter Pan, “Get me in early if you want to do the best stuff.” The really frustrating thing about illusional magic is of course the last thing it is is magic. It’s absolutely the most nitty-gritty technical annoying thing. It’s quite difficult to achieve. It requires a lot of concealment. It suddenly struck me on Ghost that all of a choreographer’s energy goes into what’s on show, and about 95 per cent of my energy goes into concealment. That can be really frustrating, when you’re watching someone who’s totally free to just change that and that. If I want to change something I might have to have someone in a workshop build something for a month. It drives me nuts.
Well, you chose this line of work and I would ask the question why?

Don’t most boys have a fascination with learning magic? Did you?

Not particularly. But I take your point.

At some point a lot of boys start learning card tricks. I don’t know why it is boys more than girls. There was this joke shop in Southampton Row called Alan Alan’s Magic Spot. Allan Allan used to wear a giant pin through his head. He was actually quite rude. If you asked him if he had anything he always used to say you should look in the window. But if you spent long enough there you actually realised he was a really brilliant guy. He was actually the first man to escape from a straitjacket while hanging upside down from a burning rope. He had this very high-profile career as an escapologist and he was actually very wise and smart, and if you chatted to him for long enough he’d actually give you some really good insights into what you should be doing. “Here’s something that would suit you.” And he would go round the back and come back and show you this card trick. There were a couple of brilliant magic shops in London at that time. Davenport’s was still running. It used to be opposite the British Museum so I used to nag my father to take me to the British Museum. It was a bit of a schlep. I grew up in Buckhurst Hill. I’m an Essex boy. I found this trick where if I said I wanted to go to the British Museum he was delighted that I wanted to be educated and then afterwards I’d say, “Oh, can we just go to the magic shop?” And I’d spend three hours in the magic shop.

It was your first trick.

It was. But even at the British Museum the thing that fascinated me was the Egyptian rooms and the mystery. So I was doing tricks. My mum was a childhood actress. She actually gave it up when she got married. My father said she had to choose him or acting. But we were always taken to things like Marcel Marceau. My dad was an artist who went to art school but then went into economics, but he was from an East End Jewish family and I think he wanted to support his parents and realised he couldn’t do it through art. So they were supportive and encouraging on the creative side. And then I did some competitions in my early teens and did magic in the Duke of Edinburgh award and built a box at school for cutting my sister in half. The Sade thing was quite a turning point for me.

Could you tell that story?

I had had some cards printed up, my first business cards, and my mum had been in a pop video with The Kinks, “Don’t Forget to Dance”, and she’d worked with the director Julien Temple and she’d given my cards out, being a good supportive Jewish mother, and they’d got confused and thought she was the magician. They phoned her up asking her whether she could do this tick in the video. She said, “No, it’s my son that does the magic.” So then I got on the phone and was disappointed that they wanted a female magician to double in for the hands and I recommended this other girl, she couldn’t do it and they phoned me back and said, “Any other thoughts?” I said, “My hands are quite small. Maybe I could do it in gloves?” I went to this audition – I was very nervous going to this audition in Soho- and they gave me the job, and on the day they changed their minds about the gloves and, having failed to bleach my even then hairy arms, aged 16, they taped my arms shaved to the elbows and my arms stood in for Sade. I just remember having a real laugh that day.

What impact did that have professionally?

I think it helped because Sade would very sweetly talk about it in interviews. She chatted about it on Kid Jensen’s show on Radio 1 at a time when a lot more people listened. She used to phone me up when the video was going to be on TV. I landed an appearance on Blue Peter largely on the back of it when I went in and sliced Janet Ellis into three pieces in my homemade zigzag box.

I left school and was doing my own stage act for a while. I worked in Jersey in variety – it was the end of variety. I was a resident support act in this venue called the Inn on the Park being paid peanuts, but I had the experience of working as a support act for everyone from Chubby Brown and Bernard Manning to Roy Castle and Rolf Harris and the Platter and Gloria Gaynor and Bob Monkhouse. So every night was a different audience. And of course it was surprising how many of them had started in magic. I remember Bob Monkhouse being really really supportive and chatting for hours and getting this amazing time with some of these names. I know he’s incredibly politically incorrect but

I remember Bernard Manning being rather charming. The thing that was significant in terms of my theatre work is that I was doing a visual act, it was not chit chat, I was doing an act that was quite highly dense in terms of visual material.

Were you into the chit chat? Derren Brown’s show is partly about his rapport with the audience?

What’s really odd is that when I started I did that entirely. My mum had a pup theatre in the East End, the New Globe Theatre in the Mile End Road and I remember out of complete ignorance, and I’m sure it was terrible; I did a whole show there when I was 16 which was all chat. And then there was a market for a polished 10-minute continental-style act that was all set to music and I rather liked the drama of the mystery. Again, who wants to hear a 17-year-old being a smart arse? And I quite liked the music and the lighting. So at 19, after I’d lost my second assistant, who’d got a better paid dance job in panto, I thought, oh no, I’ve got to train another assistant, so I went into a double act with a local magician called Lawrence Layton. It’s excruciatingly embarrassing but we called ourselves the Zodiac Brothers. We got onto New Faces. But we worked continually. We were identifiable. We did a lot of work on cruise ships.

‘Siegfried and Roy were on a $50 million a year contract and I remember thinking, God, I wouldn’t want to do that no matter how much someone paid me’

How long did you do that for?

About four years. I got absolutely fed up with it and wanted to leave and go to university and study something else. I didn’t get that far. I got out of the act.

Was it acrimonious?

Fairly, although we’re friends now. It was like going through a divorce but the children were the act. We lived out of each other’s pockets. Absolutely everything was invested in this act, including our made-to-measure suits. We worked on a high level. We were doing the QE2. For some reason we wanted to work in Las Vegas. That was the goal in the Eighties. And then I remember going over and seeing Siegfried and Roy and thinking this was a dream to work in Vegas, and when I actually met them I realised this was a bit of a nightmare being in the same show two nights a week. They were on a $50 million a year contract and I remember thinking, God, I wouldn’t want to do that no matter how much someone paid me. I think it was seeing how bored they were – I didn’t meet Roy till years later – but Siegfried was bored out of his brains. And I remember then thinking, I’d like to do this but what I love is coming up with the stuff and creating it. Just having this fear about being a 50-year-old stuck on a cruise ship. We used to see these terrible acts that literally were totally institutionalised. They would go back home for two weeks of the year and they didn’t know what to do because no one had left a chocolate on their pillow at night.

Were you arguing about who owned the tricks?

Oh God, we did at the end.

Did you both ditch the tricks or did you have equal access?

We had one particular act which was successful and had taken us to America, and we’d done the Magic Castle in Hollywood and all that sort of stuff. We bizarrely appeared on Japanese TV. That was the thing that we were most pushing for before we’d decided it was enough. We actually both ended up doing different versions of that act with different people but there wasn’t really a market for it unless you wanted to be on cruise ships all the time. In London in 1991 you might pick up the occasional corporate thing. But there is a link to this. During this period of time, right the way back to the first act I did with an assistant, I auditioned for the Theatre Royal Stratford East variety nights and also we used to try out stuff there as the Zodiac Brothers if we were in town. We always used to get a phone call saying, “Are you free for the variety night?” They were wonderful nights. I was on the QE2, the last contract I did with the Zodiac Brothers, and the day after I got off the ship I got this call from Kate Williams saying, “We’re doing a production of The Invisible Man and we need some help.” I’d already applied for university, I can’t, to be honest, really remember what I’d applied for but it was something in film production. I felt it would be quite interesting going into film.

‘Ken Hill was very inventive. He used to have this phrase: “Just jig it out with a bit of ply”’

So you were prepared to abandon magic?

It’s difficult to know. What I knew is that I really wanted to get out of that double act. I didn’t want to be stuck on cruise shops. I could feel my life blood draining away doing three 20-minute acts every two weeks in a bow tie. Probably the material was quite invigorating but it was just clear that we were trying to work in a field that had probably gone 20 years ago.

So you got this call that rescued you from university?

I didn’t know at the time who the hell Ken Hill was but he was a protégé of Joan Littlewood. He was an amazing guy. He was a very tall, gruff, blunt man but he absolutely trusted me – I don’t know how or why – just handed over on the effects. I think he knew he could have done something. He was very inventive. He used to have this phrase: “Just jig it out with a bit of ply.” And I think his attitude was probably if I had screwed up royally he’d still have quite a fun show on his hands, the whole idea of doing The Invisible Man being an absurd notion. His team of players who were mostly ex-Joan Littlewood Theatre workshop. The surprising mix which I had no clue about at the time – you have to imagine, I had come in from the world of being obsessed with very high-level Las Vegas magic, wanting to do the most spectacular illusions possible, and then being thrown into this rough, thrown-together, storytelling theatre, and I just went in in complete ignorance with the most full-on magical ways of doing these things.

The tradition of doing magic in theatre at that point was to do it as quickly as possible. Do it in an afternoon, don’t do complicated methods because they are only going to go wrong. We had scenes where the whole blocking had to be arranged around people avoiding this piece of fishing line. He took my stuff and made it work. He used to come in at 7 in the morning at the typewriter and just rewrite a whole scene if he liked the idea. Very, very unprecious about his own writing, because he came from TV. He’d do the same with actors. If an actor was killing a joke he’d just cut it. Working with Ken Hill turned out to be a relationship which lasted till the end of his life, which was in 1995. It was probably the greatest learning I had in theatre. I was really thrown in at the deep end. It was an amazing time to be at Stratford East. I still feel very, very lucky.

Did that job turn you into an invisible man yourself, in that you withdrew from performance?

The fact is I never totally decided to give up performing and I still haven’t. But I realised that I didn’t need to be doing it all the time.

‘I had a growing discomfort with performing magic because it felt like not a very honest thing to be doing’

How often do you perform?

Not very often now but I wrote a book in 1997 which was published around the world and Bloomsbury asked me to do book festivals. I started doing these things and I felt, I’m an author now, I don’t need to do any magic. I can just go out and talk about the history of magic. And of course magic is a wonderful gift for a live thing. So my first version at Cheltenham, there were probably three things I did on the tour. I did a thing at the Polka Theatre at the Wimbledon Festival and it had already expanded at that point. Then I had an opportunity to do it at the Magic Circle Theatre. All this was to do with promoting the book but what it became was a show in its own right. The Southbank Imagination Festival then asked me to do it. By this point my younger brother, Daniel Kieve, who is a pianist and singer, had written some live music for it. So I put him into it. It was actually becoming a show. It really worked for me because I wasn’t having to pretend to be anything. One of the problems I have with doing magic as a stage performance is this peculiar relationship with the audience. I had a growing discomfort with performing magic because it felt like not a very honest thing to be doing. There were things that I was running from in my teens that I wasn’t running away from in my twenties. There is a peculiar balance with that in magic. Either you do the whole thing as comedy, or you do it through a very dramatic stage persona which is, I suppose, what I prefer to do. I’ve never felt very comfortable doing close-up magic. I find it an uncomfortable social thing to do. But I do find a lot of magicians are uncomfortable social beings. But I do think magic is a wonderful thing. It creates its own emotional response which, when you do it well, is wonder or astonishment. You can’t get that with anything else.

Is there such a thing as a typical psychological profile of a magician?

I think it’s the classic thing when you’re young. You learn sometimes quite a simple thing that suddenly impresses adults. You get approval and it gives you a bit of power. That’s something that is an odd thing. I don’t feel that at all with the stage stuff. With people I’m working with I don’t have to pretend to be doing anything. It is what it is. We’re all working together to hopefully create something that is then wonderful and astonishing for the audience and I don’t have to stand there and take any credit for it. I work a lot with Terry King who is a fight director and, in a way, my billing on a show should be magic director. I’m coordinating all of those elements. I love doing it in a collaborative team. Magicians tend to be loners. When I was doing the show, trying to do things without all these fancy lighting rigs, I ended up with a performance which I could take in hand luggage. When I do it I get in through the book. The book is the history of magicians and what tricks they did. So I can go through it more or less as a lecturer. I’m genuinely not taking credit for it. I have to be able to do it well. The zigzag illusion, Harbin’s amazing genius invention which has become a cliché, of the middle of the girl being pulled to one side: this guy built it in his garage and spent 30 years thinking about this thing and built five of them wrong before he got one right. He hit on something which is a work of genius. It’s now become a sort of cliché. I do it in the show and I can say when Harbin did this in 1965 it was on the front page of the papers the next day.

What are the shows which for you represent your top five?

Lord of the Rings was a phenomenal title to work on. I know that it wasn’t welcomed with open arms but when you’re involved in these things from the inside, the last thing, certainly from the point of view of the team in it, was any cynicism about doing that title because of the films. There was this huge challenge of doing this thing which was virtually going to be unstageable as a theatre production. I agree with Matthew that you can do anything on stage if you approach it in the right way. Whether or not Lord of the Rings artistically was a success or not is not for me to say. But in terms of the scale of it and the evolution of that piece it was an amazing one to work on. I got to do one thing which I was very proud of which was the vanishing of Bilbo Baggins at the beginning, because we managed to do something that hadn’t been done before. I did have the benefit of it being very early on in the show. Every single thing that changes in where it happens in the story affects what I can do. The fact that Bilbo disappears at the beginning meant that I could do something I couldn’t do in Ghost at all. You can do something at the beginning of the show that requires a half-hour pre-set, incredible precision in terms of where things are placed. I remember Derren Brown came to see it and he was totally fooled by it. You welcome these things. I know that they’ve got to look remarkable because that’s what my job is, but that’s just my job. You just get on with your work so you can almost forget that it has a memorable impact on the audience. And that’s what magic can do.

I’ve worked on over 100 shows. What’s really memorable is a couple of shows with Improbable. Cinderella was really interesting, working with their improvised style. Years later we did Theatre of Blood which for me was fantastic. It was using stage illusion in order to deliver a series of very extreme murders. The magic was very central because the high dramatic point in each of the scenes was always the murders. You had to deliver something special.

‘They’ve got this huge special effects team and I’m saying, “I can do that with a bit of thread.” You can imagine that doesn’t always go down well’

What was your task on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban?

The direct of the third film, Alfonso Cuarón, wanted specifically to have some things in the film that weren’t computer effects. He wanted someone who worked with directors and he wanted there to be supplementary effects and illusions that occurred in real time in shot. It was mainly to do things that were background or perhaps wouldn’t make their way in if they were CGI or special effect. He wanted a bit more control. So I did this thing that Americans called a Show and Tell. So I went in on a February morning and all the departments were there and producers. It wasn’t auditioning for me. It felt like I was auditioning for live magic. I had two hours to show all the range that you could do in live magic and that included big scale things down to the smaller things appearing in the hands. One of the things I demonstrated was a note that folded up by itself. The production designer immediately came over and said, “We’ve got this thing called the Marauder’s Map. It has to fold up by itself. We’d love you to look at that.” Also I got a sense that it’s such a huge film that you get a division between departments. Design can come up with something and by the time it goes through CGI it’s not really what they wanted it to look like. There was one effect I suggested, which I used to do in my old stage act: a candle that multiplies in the fingers. I said, “If you’ve got a wizard in a pub, he can be reading by candlelight and what you would do is make candles appear in his fingers.” If you take an old jaded trick – a nice effect – you put it into a context, and suddenly there’s a justification for it.

How will people know that it’s live magic?

In that example, the director said, “How long would it take to teach an actor?” I said, “Oh, a few days.” “Why don’t you do it?” I’m the only magician ever to have appeared in the Harry Potter films and that is the only thing done by sleight of hand.

But most people won’t know it was real magic.

In the end it doesn’t matter. For me it was a wonderful opportunity to work on that film set and I had a wonderful time. But for the director it was a way of getting a few more visuals in that wouldn’t have been there. I did the floating balls in the astronomy room. My position on it I always felt was tricky. They’ve got this huge special effects team and CGI and I’m coming in and saying, “I can do that with a bit of thread.” You can imagine that doesn’t always go down well. The thing I’m proudest of in that film is that I get the final special effect, which is the Marauder’s Map folding up by itself. I made that map on the table in my old house in Hackney and I made it as a one-person thing because I had to go in and show the producers. I made this thing that didn’t require 10 people to operate it and it did the job. Because it wasn’t done on machines I could give it little bits of personality. Essentially I was puppeteering it. When I was working on the film I realised that’s the difference between what I was doing and the brilliant special effects department. Everything I did was operated at some point by a person. It was performed, like puppetry.

What did the CGI guys say to you?

They didn’t say anything to me.

They tried to make you the invisible man.

I just think it’s different worlds. I think they thought I was a freak, a lunatic. My stuff is always very, very exposed. If I fail, everyone sees it. I can’t build my stuff in a model box and I can’t do an animation of it. It’s exciting because if it works, it’s fantastic. If this heightened moment doesn’t work, then it’s excruciating. I’m also a one-person department. On Harry Potter CGI make all their mistakes in private. If you’re doing a computer animation that doesn’t work, you don’t show anyone. My experience as a performer is helpful like that. You are flying by the seat of your pants.

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“It was quite daunting,” adds Kieve (a veteran of stage and screen sorcery, who has worked on The Invisible Man and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, among many others). “You don’t know whether you are going to screw up until you get it on to the stage.”

There are spectacular illusions in the show, but they are used much more sparingly than in the film. Warchus explains that the team wanted to avoid staging a conjuring display: “We put a line through all the tricks that seemed to be cosmetic rather than fundamental. If you do too many they start to cannibalise each other.”

The most brilliant effects – people vanishing, ghosts rising out of bodies – coincide with the emotional climaxes of the story. Kieve had to make them convincing without upstaging the drama: “You can make the audience think ‘how is that done?’ and that can jolt them out of the story,” he explains.

That meant embedding the effects in the fabric of the story. If a man is going to vanish before an audience’s eyes, the team quickly realised, the set and direction have to support that from the outset. In rehearsals, Warchus got used to being told by Kieve that some areas of the stage were out of bounds “for secret reasons”. Actors submitted to inch-precise instructions as to where to stand. Meanwhile Howell produced a multi-tasking set of sliding screens, capable of framing the intimate scenes and the bustling New York streets, while carrying both the optical illusions and the music videos that accompany the songs

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The staged movie is now part of the cultural furniture. Some morph into musicals, some become plays, and a few, such as Brief Encounter and The 39 Steps cleverly stake out their own territory. But some films surely remain unstageable. And you’d think that one of those would be Ghost.

You remember Ghost. Patrick Swayze, as a murder victim who talks to his widowed wife, Demi Moore, through a medium played by Whoopi Goldberg, would walk through a door as soon as look at it. His hand passed through objects he couldn’t pick up. He could shove a coin invisibly up a vertical surface. How do you do that on stage? The answer is you call Paul Kieve. And Matthew Warchus, the director of Ghost: The Musical, made sure he called him early.

“I don’t think I’m giving too much away,” Kieve says, “to say that the whole set has been designed around these optical effects which are extraordinarily difficult to achieve. In theatre you would normally never say that in order to make this guy vanish in a way that’s never been seen before in a show, we’ve got to do everything else backwards from it. How long’s that effect going to last? Two seconds.”

But that is what has happened. Ghost, adapted by Bruce Joel Rubin from his own screenplay and featuring songs by Dave Stewart and Glen Ballard, has had a long trial run at the Manchester Opera House. It enters the West End fully tweaked so that, whatever audiences make of the rest of the show, the visual trickery will take their breath away. It’s also Kieve’s job to make sure it doesn’t run away with every scene. “In theatre you have to be aware that people are seeing it live,” he says. “In film you know it’s an effect and you don’t even think about it. You do exactly those same things on stage and people at best are astonished, at worst totally jolted out of the story. It’s working out when things have an emotional impact.”

Not every illusionist thinks so collegiately. But if such a thing as a conventional illusionist’s career exists, Kieve has not had one. Growing up in Essex, he was obsessed with tricks. “You learn quite a simple thing that suddenly impresses adults. You get approval and it gives you a bit of power.” His most manipulative sleight of hand was to get his father to take him to a magic shop in the heart of London. “I found this trick where if I said I wanted to go to the British Museum he was delighted that I wanted to be educated and then afterwards I’d say, ‘Oh can we just go to the magic shop opposite?’ And I’d spend three hours in the magic shop.”

He got his first break at 16 when he was hired to do a card trick on Sade’s debut video for Your Love is King. To pass his forearms off as Sade’s he shaved them and wore gloves, and got an invitation on to Blue Peter. Soon his dramatic magic act was opening in Jersey as a support act for everyone from Bernard Manning to Gloria Gaynor. Then, at 19, he lost an assistant and, rather than train a new one up, decided to form a double act called the Zodiac Brothers. It lasted for four years.

“We got on to New Faces. We did a lot of work on cruise ships. I remember thinking it was a dream to work in Vegas and when I actually met [the Vegas institution] Siegfried and Roy I realised this was a bit of a nightmare. Siegfried was bored out of his brains. They were on a $50 million a year contract and I remember thinking I wouldn’t want to do that, no matter how much someone paid me.”

The split was acrimonious – “like going through a divorce but the children were the act”. Kieve conceived a plan to escape to university, and had even applied when he got a call from Theatre Royal Stratford East. “They said, ‘We’re doing a production of The Invisible Man and we need some help.’ ” That was in 1991, and he was still in his early twenties. In 1995 he began his long association with the director Matthew Warchus, first on Volpone at the National and then in West Yorkshire Playhouse’s Peter Pan. Warchus, designer Rob Howell and Kieve, all three dark-haired men in their forties, have since collaborated often, most challengingly on Lord of the Rings. Whatever the reception for the show, it did contain one remarkable illusion in which Bilbo Baggins vanished before the audience’s eyes.

“I was very proud of doing something that hadn’t been done before. I did have the benefit of it being very early on in the show when you can do something that requires a half-hour preset and incredible precision in terms of where things are placed. I remember Derren Brown came to see it and he was totally fooled by it.”

We meet in Kieve’s elegant sitting room in Hackney, the shelves of a tall cabinet groaning with books about magic. One of those volumes is by Kieve himself. Although he became an all-but-invisible man when he joined the theatre, he wrote a history of magic in 1997 which took him out on the book festival circuit. “I felt, I’m an author now, I can just go out and talk about the history of magic. And of course magic is a wonderful gift for a live thing. Promoting the book became a show in its own right.”

But mostly he is in hiding. Other invisible gigs include being the only actual magician ever to work on the set of a Harry Potter film, and a contribution to Martin Scorsese’s forthcoming Hugo Cabret. Now you see him, now you don’t. Twenty years on, he remains ambivalent about subordinating his gift to a larger creative design.

“It suddenly struck me on Ghost that all of a choreographer’s energy is put into what’s on show, and about 95 per cent of my energy is concealment. That can be really frustrating, when you’re watching someone who’s totally free to just change that and that. If I want to change something I might have to have someone in a workshop build something for a month. It drives me nuts.”

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There’s a rule in magic that you never do a trick twice, says illusionist Paul Kieve. But he cheerfully breaks that rule in Ghost The Musical at Manchester’s Opera House. Three times, we see a character die, and their ghost rise up in startled realisation, looking back at their own mortal remains lying on stage. How on earth did they do that, you wonder?

Kieve – a member of the Magic Circle – is not about to answer that question. But he does admit that creating these illusions has been a collaborative process. The set for Ghost The Musical was designed from the start with Kieve’s illusions in mind. And he has had to share at least some of the tricks of his trade with the crew who make them happen nightly.

We see ghosts moving into and taking over the bodies of the living, a ghost walking through a door and trying to grasp objects through which his hand passes. And then there is a spellbinding finale involving Richard Fleeshman as the ghostly Sam Wheat which, without giving anything away, really will have you scratching your head and reaching for the hankie at the same time.

“I didn’t realise, but we had a lot of magicians in on the first preview and they wrote to me afterwards,” says Kieve. “They were all really nice comments, and a lot said they were totally fooled by it.

“And I’ve learned a lot from the audience reaction. It’s reinvigorated me in terms of my believing how strong magic and illusion can be when you do it live.

“With a new show, you only know what you’ve got when you put it in front of an audience. With Ghost, the reaction on the first preview, I’ll never forget it. The sight of the entire audience standing as soon as the curtain touched the floor was pretty moving.”

The show has been created by Bruce Joel Rubin, whose screenplay for the 1990 Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore movie won him an Oscar in 1990, and is directed by Matthew Warchus. Staging a production in which the leading man is dead for most of the story provides some unusual challenges. Kieve has been working since August 2009 to create all the illusions which make these ghostly goings-on plausible.

“The thing about my work is that I can’t just go to a book and say, ‘How do you do the split-body thing’. So it’s a constant work in progress,” says Kieve. “I don’t really know what I’ve got until I see it on stage. I have to work with the lighting and the actors.”

Kieve has now seen the show 18 times and was still making tweaks up until the day before returning to his home in Hackney, London. After completing its run on May 14, Ghost the Musical will be London-bound, too, opening at the Piccadilly Theatre on June 22.

It’s another highlight on the CV of an illusionist whose love affair with magic began at the age of ten. Performing was in the genes, his mum Millie, who grew up in Manchester, having acted with Stretford Children’s Theatre.

Kieve, now aged 43, worked for five years in a magic double act, doing clubs and cruise ships. His big ambition had been to work in Las Vegas – home of the big illusion shows such as Siegfried and Roy, who would magic lions and tigers from thin air.

But, in 1991, Kieve was hired as magic advisor for a stage version of The Invisible Man. Since then, he has worked on stage productions of The Witches, Our House, Lord of the Rings and Scrooge The Musical. He also created some magical effects for the movie Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and tutored actor Daniel Radcliffe.

Kieve has also worked with Derren Brown.

“People don’t see him as a magician, although he explains he is,” says Kieve.

“He’s found a very clever way to frame mystery. He’s also taken himself by surprise in terms of how good he is live. He’s a natural showman.”

Over the years, Kieve has accumulated 2,000 books on the history of magic, and is interested in particular in the 1860s when optics in magic – smoke and mirrors – coincided with a fascination for spiritualism and ghosts.

It was at this time that a chemical engineer, John Henry Pepper, adapted the work of inventor Henry Dircks to create “Pepper’s Ghost” – a means of creating a holographic ghost image which could appear on a theatrical stage.

“This was one of the most famous stage effects ever done,” says Kieve. “There’s this whole era I’m fascinated with and has hugely influenced what we do on stage here. What you are seeing is partly state-of-the-art technology, but partly stuff that was thought about in the 1860s.”

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Do you have any advice on how to become a good magician?

Firstly you have to be interested in becoming good – it’s not very easy – it’s like learning to play an instrument! So patience is important. But you can quickly get a lot of enjoyment from it, and there are some quite impressive tricks which I describe in ‘Hokus Pokus’ which are easy to learn and will amaze your audience! But being a good magician isn’t only about the tricks, it’s about communicating those tricks with your audience, even if your audience is a couple of friends! .

I’d recommend you go and see as many magicians as you can live – and also look at other magicians work (there are lots on the website ‘Youtube’ now!) This isn’t to copy ideas – just to see how different performers present their magic.

What is your favourite legerdemain? And who was the conjurer?

I think the most amazing illusion I ever saw in a theatre was Harry Blackstone from America making a lit light bulb float right over the heads of the audience in a theatre even though he’d passed a hoop over the bulb to show there were no wires. He presented it very gracefully and when the bulb floated right over my head it was a real magical surprise! I will also never forget seeing the German illusionists Siegfried and Roy changing their assistant into a tiger in a glass box suspended over the audience – I happened quick as a flash and right in front of me! I was speechless.

What does the audience learn in “Hokuspokus?

The idea of ‘Hokus Pokus’ came from my lessons teaching Daniel Radcliffe how to do magic. I wanted to really inspire him to be interested in everything about magic – not just the tricks – about the stories of the great magicians, and how to be a really good magician. Some of the stories are really scary and weird – you couldn’t invent them! It worked – Daniel took up magic very seriously and still performs magic even now from time to time. So I hope the book does the same for the readers – it will teach you all about the amazing world of magic, and teach you to do lots of tricks in a really fun way.

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What was your first pet?  A  Terrapin, but my Mum took it back to the shop after a couple of days because she read somewhere that they carried some kind of disease. I was really sad.

What’s your favourite food? Chocolate and Chicken, although I don’t normally eat them in that order

What’s your least favourite food? Beetroot – I don’t understand why it was invented.

What was the most memorable birthday party you’ve ever been to? I once performed at the tenth birthday of the niece of the Sultan of Brunei which was held at Claridges ballroom in London.  It was unbelievable. For many of the wrong reasons!

What was your most embarrassing moment while you were growing up?  Taking a clarinet lesson at school . I found it very difficult and used to take a class jointly with one other pupil.  Trying to get a note out of the thing is actually much harder than it looks – your mouth has to be in the right position and I always remember my teacher telling me I had a ‘slack embouchure’,  I never really understood what he meant. One day I was forcing myself so hard to try to make a sound emerge that, let’s just say that there was a musical noise – but it was rather more of a trumpet sound and it, ahem,  didn’t come out of the clarinet.  I’ll never forget my teacher just saying ‘Oh Dear’.  I gave up playing soon after.

Tell us a secret about yourself . I never tell secrets – it’s my job not to!

What’s your worst habit? Trying to do too many things at once and leaving things to the last minute (like these questions)

Where is your favourite place in the world?  My bed.

What’s the worst job you ever had? I once had to perform a magic show in a really rough nightclub in Birkenhead just after Liverpool had lost the FA cup to Wimbledon.  I was announced as ‘from London’ which didn’t help.

What’s the best thing about being a grown up?  Having your own house

What’s the worst thing about being a grown up? Having to pay for your own house

What was the last music you bought? A CD of Argentinean tango music

Who’s your favourite author? Professor Hoffmann – he’s a writer from the Victorian era.  He wrote amazing books on magic but also mad things like ‘Home Gymnastics’ and ‘Tips For Tricyclists’.  He comes to life in my book!

Which book do you always recommend to your readers?  Well – I’ve never done it before because Hocus Pocus is my first book – so I’ll recommend that one!

Which book do you wish you’d written and why?  I wish I’d written a book called Hiding The Elephant by Jim Steinmeyer – it’s the best book on the history of magic in recent years – it really brings the subject to life.

Tell us about the best holiday you ever went on.  It was a working holiday – I used to work with Guinness World Records and we took a trip to Las Vegas to give certificates to all the greatest magicians in the world.  And we were given the best tickets for all the shows in Las Vegas!

Where would you most like to visit? I’m really lucky because my work as a magician has taken me to over 50 countries, but I’d love to go to Machu Picchu in Peru. I’d also love to visit China.

What’s your favourite thing about yourself? I don’t follow the crowd.

Which radio station do you listen to? Radio 4 until The Archers comes on, and then I find a music station for a while!

What did you feel when you saw a copy of your book for the first time? That was only three days ago.  I was amazed and delighted – I’m used to working in theatre where the results are instant.  Seeing the book so long after the manuscript went off was weird – I had to re-read bits of it to remind myself I’d written it!

Are you a tidy desk person or a messy desk person? Desk? I can’t see my desk – oh it’s under there somewhere..

How do you reward yourself when you finish a book? A really nice bar of chocolate and a cup of tea.

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You might think that teaching Harry Potter how to do magic sounds a bit like teaching your grandmother how to suck eggs. But when Potter star Daniel Radcliffe wanted to learn the tricks of the trade, it wasn’t Dumbledore he turned to – far from it. He drafted in the non-fictional (and somewhat less hairy) figure of real-life master magician, Paul Kieve. The man behind some of the most impressive illusions on stage and screen, as well as being personal magic tutor to Harry Potter himself, Kieve’s talents have been called upon by the likes of Derren Brown, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Walt Disney; he’s helped saw Simon Cowell in half for Children in Need, taught a cast of vagabonds the art of pick-pocketing for BBC 1’s I’d Do Anything and is currently causing Hobbits to vanish nightly in front of audiences at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Needless to say, when the New Vic needed its leading man to saw a woman in half whilst singing his champagne aria, there was only one man for the job…

Trying to catch Paul Kieve at a quiet moment is a tricky endeavour. The most prolific and arguably successful illusions consultant in theatre history, Paul is certainly in demand, as his schedule proves. I manage to track Kieve down in between rehearsals for Don Giovanni, a production that has seen the trailblazing illusionist face possibly his biggest challenge to date: making a group of actors look like accomplished magicians.

“Now that’s an entirely different challenge,” laughs Paul on his latest venture. “Obviously I’m more used to designing effects than making actors look convincing whilst performing a magician’s repertoire. But the fact that there is nowhere to hide can actually help the actors – the audience are so near to you that they are usually more impressed!”

Certainly, there is also the small matter of performing a series of illusions in the round, with an audience close to the action, on all sides. As Paul says, even though sawing a woman in half and making someone disappear in the round is not without its problems, nothing is impossible.

“Performing in the round can be tricky. I started off life as a performer and obviously gone are the days when you only work in proscenium arch theatres, so it always has to be versatile. But cutting the cloth to the width is all part of my job. We are being a bit cheeky with some of the effects for Don Giovanni but, with a little bit of help from the lighting and the staging, we’ve been able to create the final result.”

Certainly, a challenge is nothing new to Paul whose consulting work for both stage and screen has seen the illusionist from London change the face of magical special effects in theatre. It all started in 1991, when a unique opportunity presented itself. Paul had just finished a tour as one half of double-act The Zodiac Brothers when a friend mentioned that writer and theatre director Ken Hill was looking for someone to help with special effects for his adaptation of The Invisible Man. Would he be interested? The production presented the young magician with the daunting task of actually achieving an invisible character on stage: “People have said to me since ‘How did you know any of it would work?’ In retrospect I didn’t know any of it would work. With illusion and magic, you’re hoping to create something that has a very particular effect on the audience, which is hopefully astonishment and enjoyment.” Paul needn’t have worried. Not only did it work – he created an invisible man that appeared to smoke cigarettes live on stage – but his effects stole the show, winning rave reviews and a world record for over 40 magical effects in the process.

Since then Kieve’s talent has taken him all over the world, working with some of the biggest names in the business. But amongst the ‘David Copperfield’s’ and the ‘Walt Disney’s’, there is one particular credit in Paul’s impressive biog that stands out.
“It was terrific to be involved with Harry Potter”, says Paul on the project that saw him become the only ever magician to work on the world’s most successful film series. Indeed, when film director Alfonso Cuaron, the man behind Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, decided he wanted real magic in the movie he called in Kieve. “I was working very closely with the director and was responsible for some of the ‘real live’ magic effects.”
Not only did Paul impress the director enough to win a cameo role, but it was whilst working on the film that Kieve also gained the epithet of ‘real-life Dumbledore’. Explains Paul: “Daniel Radcliffe (who plays Harry Potter) is a fantastic kid and he showed a genuine interest in magic, so I started to teach a few bits during lunch breaks on the film set. Eventually, I was going over to his house in Fulham on his days off for two or three hours of ‘magic-jamming’ sessions! His energy for it was so infectious I ended up re-learning stuff I hadn’t done in ten years.”

His work teaching Daniel and telling him anecdotes about bygone magicians has led Paul to take a leaf out of JK Rowling’s book – literally. The unstoppable illusionist has just finished penning his own children’s fiction, Hocus Pocus. “I hadn’t taught a young person magic before, so I thought if Daniel wanted to learn, I didn’t want to just teach him a few tricks. I wanted to try and give him an overall sense of this great world. So I started to take over an old book with a funny story about one of the great magicians from the ‘golden age’ of stage illusion, and as I was doing that I thought that this isn’t a bad idea for a book. That was the start of Hocus Pocus.”

With a foreword by Daniel himself and testimonials from no less than Derren Brown and David Copperfield, this new foray into fiction will undoubtedly prove another success for the magician with the Midas touch.

Certainly, with Paul on board, Don Giovanni is another project set for theatre gold – after, that is, he finishes the task in hand. As Kieve ends our conversation to return to putting our actors through their magical paces, it strikes me that Count Zhivarny and co. are in the safest pair of hands there is. Needless to say, when it comes to showing you a thing or two about magic, who needs Hogwarts?

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Paul Kieve is a professional illusionist whose consulting work for both stage and screen has contributed to changing how magical special effects in productions are approached. His work for the stage production of “The Invisible Man” holds the world record for the most effects in one show. His current projects include the Harry Potter film series and Phantom of the Opera.Alec Gamble talked to Paul about the publication of his new book, Hocus Pocus, due out in paperback this month.

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Hocus Pocus draws a lot on your personal and professional interests. How much of it is autobiographical?

Well, obviously all the most fantastic bits! Actually, the elements of it that are true are: that I really live in Hackney; I have a fascination with the Hackney Empire Theatre, which is down the road from where I live; the house is in the book is based on my real house and I do have a collection of old magic posters, which I’ve been collecting for about ten years.

Some events in the story are true as well. When I was 10 or 11, I went into a magic shop where I can distinctly remember seeing an Egyptian Mummy case behind the counter. I very seriously asked the man in the magic shop (which was actually in Hamleys) how much it cost. He just said, “That’s more than a few weeks’ pocket money for you son,” in a very patronising way. I recall feeling belittled by that, but also I was determined that one day I would show him! I did end up with a Mummy case, which I used as my tool cupboard, so that’s all true.

Another true thing is that my dad used to take me to the British Museum and I used to nip out and go to the magic shop opposite.

The stories of the magicians are true, as well, though obviously not autobiographical. I’ve always been fascinated with the lives of the great magicians, so it is very difficult for me to talk about the book without talking as though I’m the main protagonist.

Do you have to be part of the Magic Circle to buy certain pieces of magician’s equipment? I would imagine you can’t just drop into a shop like Davenports and buy anything.

The shop in my book is actually based on Davenports because it used be situated opposite the British Museum. At the back of the book, there’s an incredible optical illusion that was loaned to me by John Davenport, who was related to the founder of Davenports, Lewis Davenport.

They’re actually the longest running family magic business in the UK. As to whether some pieces of equipment are restricted, the truth of the matter is that the world of magic is quite confusing, especially now that you can buy things on the internet. The thing is that magic dealers are there to make money; it’s their business.

So that’s a strange tension – turning people away and taking the business. I think if you have enough money, you can probably buy anything and that would be true of the mummy case in Hamleys as well.

There was a wonderful magician called Alan Alan who used to run a magic shop on Southampton Row and he made a fortune as an escapologist. He was the first man to escape from a straitjacket hanging upside down from a burning rope, have you ever seen that done?

It’s become a standard act of escapologists but Alan was the first one to do it. When he opened his magic shop, he’d already retired and had already made a lot of money, so he used to take great pleasure in sending people out of his shop, if he thought they were a bit spoilt or asking for things in the wrong way.

Would the mummy case have been used in a live performance?

Well a lot of these great magicians drew on anything that seemed to be exotic and mysterious. There was a magician called Carter the Great and he capitalised on his name when he was performing in the 1920s because of Howard Carter the explorer. I’ve got a wonderful poster which shows Carter the Great with the Mysteries of the Sphinx. Egyptian hieroglyphs and Egyptian imagery would have been painted on props just to give them a sense of the mysterious. I suspect that the prop I saw in Hamleys was a trick called “Cutting someone into fifths”, where you would put someone in the box, and then you put five blades in, and apparently cut them into five pieces.

The Mummy case that I have is a theatrical one. Most of my work has been designing magical effects for theatre productions like The Witches, and Scrooge, the Musical and a play called Theatre of Blood.

I saw that at the National Theatre.

Well, I did all those strange killings. Previously at the National Theatre I worked on a play called Le Grande Magia which was directed by Richard Eyre. In that play, there’s a character who disappears in a Mummy case which needed to look like a traditional magic prop. It was designed by a wonderful West End designer called Anthony Ward. When the play came to the end of its run and they were going to throw it out, I rescued it. And now it’s my tool cupboard!

When you’re creating an illusion, do you start with an idea and then find a means of making it happen, or do you take a known illusion and turn it into something new and exciting?

That’s a good question. In theatre, it’s almost always something in a script that has been written without any sense of how it will be achieved. It’s just a stage direction and I have to make it happen. So, in the production of The Mysteries, there’s a direction that says Moses changes a snake into a staff. It’s the approach that I prefer, even when I’m inventing magical illusions.

One of the great magicians, David Devant used to say that he would come up with an idea and then find out a way of doing it, and I think that’s the best way. An example that Devant uses in one of his books was “Wouldn’t it be fun to think of a way of a fish spelling words”? So he came up with a plot by asking, “What is the story, what’s that going to be?” Then he found a way of doing the trick. I think it’s much more interesting for the audience, if there’s a good story being told.

Is that a more experienced approach? Do beginners normally start by imitating and copying good magicians?

It probably depends on the field of magic. I’m particularly interested in stage illusions and stage magic. There are other people, like Derren Brown, who are interested in mentalism – and have a particular expertise in psychological magic. Then there are other people who are very skilled at card magic. You might think these things have a lot in common but in truth they are very different. Derren came to the opening night of Lord of the Rings where I’ve created, amongst other things, the vanishing of Bilbo Baggins. At the beginning of the show, the audience sees Bilbo standing on a lit stage, surrounded by a circle of Hobbits. He puts the ring on his finger, and he literally vanishes before your eyes. In one second, he becomes transparent and disappears, it’s like watching a film, but you know you’re watching it live.

In Derren Brown’s show in the West End, he ends up with an impossible newspaper prediction. A couple of weeks after Derren had seen Lord of the Rings we sat in a restaurant for about two hours and explained to each other exactly how each trick was done. It was fascinating. We’d never had that conversation before. He’d never explained all the detail of his newspaper prediction. I’d never really gone through the detail of the Bilbo disappearance.

He’s obviously a supreme expert in his field and although I would understand some of the principles in his act, I wouldn’t have the same mastery because he’s taken it many, many steps further than anyone else.

To come back to your question, I think when you’re a beginner, in magic, it’s tempting to think it’s important to come up with your own tricks, and actually it is not.

There are a lot of clever people in the past who have come up with brilliant stuff and beginners can do very well by learning from the experts of the past. Sometimes
people think they’re improving an old trick but they actually make it worse. If an illusion is a classic then there’s a good reason that it’s a classic, and there’s nothing wrong with learning classic things. When I was a young man, a Magician called Peter Ware told me to go the International Magic Shop and buy a set of linking rings and learn the classic ring routine. Linking rings is one of the oldest tricks but it’s a classic of magic. Audiences all over the world are enchanted by it.

So which of your illusions do you think is the most fascinating one?

There are lots of things in the theatre shows that I’m proud of because I’ve had to come up with new ideas. For example, one of the plays that I worked on was the first stage production of Roald Dahl’s The Witches. I was in charge of changing the children into mice! To make this happen, I invented an illusion that I called “Formula 86” (named after the mouse-making formula that is fed to the hero at the end of the first act). On stage you see the boy shrink before your eyes. His coat crumples up onto the tabletop, but you can see underneath the table so you know he’s not going under it. Eventually they lift the coat up and there’s the little puppet mouse on the table. I loved the reaction that that used to get.

One of the first stage productions I worked on was H G Wells’ The Invisible Man. At the end of the first act, he’s confronted by the
villagers and he unwinds the bandages off his head, and sits there without a head, smoking a cigarette. That one got a lot of attention when I first devised it in 1991 for The Theatre Royal, Stratford East.

On a number of occasions, I’ve had to come up with stage vomiting. Now, you wouldn’t think about that as a thing that a magic consultant has to do. One of them was for a play called And Then There Were None, based on an Agatha Christie story. One of the characters was meant to have been fed arsenic, and they had to projectile vomit in the most violent way possible. We came up with a very elaborate system, which involved a foot pump that used to project the vomit forward. On the first performance, the person who normally operated it wasn’t very well, and they were replaced by someone who hadn’t operated it before. They accidentally projected chunky vegetable soup over the first row of the audience. It actually made into the Evening Standard newspaper, with the
headline “And then there was… a dry cleaning bill.”

So are you the equivalent of the special effects team in film?

Yes, you could say I’m the special effects for theatre. For Theatre of Blood I worked with the the Director, the Fight Director and the Designer. In Lord of the Rings it is different because someone else does all the smoke and flying. For The Invisible Man and Scrooge I basically did all the tricks that involve the actors. I suppose that’s the thing that is different – I’m concerned with performance, so it’s like doing special effects but live.

The two are closely related and if you look at the origins of film special effects, they were all done by Magicians because in those days they used to be done live.

The father of film was a man called Georges Meilies, who was a good friend of Devant. He was the first Englishman to show film to the public in London. There are lots of connections between magicians and film, so it’s an interesting loop that I ended up doing physical effects for Harry Potter.

There’s obviously a lot about the history of magic in your book, so why did you choose to write it in a fictional format?

Well, I thought the real stories of the Magicians are great. My father was a historian, and he used to bring history to life. If we visited the Tower of London or went on trips to Rome, he’d stand there and make it come alive as if it were happening then and there.

I know that people love magic, but they love it even more when it as part of a story. For example in The Invisible Man, if something floats off the table, it’s not just being done as a trick, it’s because someone invisible is supposedly lifting it off the table: the story gives it a reason. So to set Hocus Pocus as a fictional story in contemporary London seemed more fun and also for me, a real challenge. I hope it brings the stories alive.

Have you ever performed at the Hackney Empire?

I have actually, yes. I used to be in a double act when I started out in my early 20s, and in fact I was one of the first acts to perform when it was converted back into a theatre. It had previously been converted into a Bingo Hall for about 30 years. The great thing is that it was hardly touched; they didn’t bother ripping out the old décor. However, when they started demolishing part of the façade somebody got a Heritage Preservation Order on the building and that was the start of the restoration.

What do you think of the advantages and possibly disadvantages of revealing magic tricks in such a public way?

Well, I think the exposure of magic is a very controversial. David Devant was the first President of the Magic Circle in 1905. When he was an old sick man in a wheelchair, he wrote his book Secrets of My Magic, which was basically a record of all of his incredible work. Thank goodness he wrote it down. A little section of that book was printed in a magazine called the Windsor Magazine at the end of 1935, and Devant was thrown out of the Magic Circle. Naturally, he was very upset and argued that they were his tricks that he was revealing. Actually the record is historically very important: you can’t expect people to continue an art form and learn about it, if you don’t write it down. Fortunately, he was reinstated the following year.

I really hope Hocus Pocus will do nothing but inspire people to learn more about it and have respect for it as an art.

I do think television shows like “The Masked Magician” are very damaging. They show a guy in a mask with a terrible cynical voiceover going “It must be magic. I don’t think so”. It takes the thrill, the experience and wonder away. If you’re reading it from a book and you have to study it; people will only pick it up and read how it’s done, if they’re interested. I think that’s a very different motivation.

The magicians in your book are mainly western but to what extent is the magic we are familiar with influenced by world magic?

I suppose now it’s all a fusion but I think magic’s always been quite international. Show people have always been Gypsies travelling round the world. Carter the Great went on six world tours. Magicians who toured the world would certainly pick up tricks to bring back to use in their shows. Nobody knows for sure if the Chinese Rings come from China, but we know that they arrived in England with a travelling troupe.

And then there are amazing feats like the Indian fakirs who can lie on a bed of nails. Of course that isn’t presented as magic but as a spiritual feat. They probably use the same mechanisms but frame it in a different way. David Blaine is the modern equivalent, I suppose.

In the book you talk about rivalries between the old historical Magicians, is that still relevant today?

I think very much so. However, in those days magic was big business. Somebody like Devant would be earning the equivalent of £30,000 a week: a footballer’s salary. The Amazing Alexander apparently earned more money in his career in equivalent terms than the Beatles. So of course they were all fighting for each other’s tricks. If you were the first in town to saw a woman in half, you’d sell the theatre out. David Copperfield creates a lot of material that he works very, very hard on with his advisers and builders and it would be very easy for it to be stolen. I know it constantly bothers him and he’s very protective about his material.

Speaking from personal experience, I invented some illusions, and performed them at a Magic Convention, and within a short amount of time other people are doing them. The secrets behind magic aren’t normally rocket science. There’s a man called Jim Steinman who says that “Magicians guard an empty safe”, because very often you find the secret is a piece of bent coat hanger wire or holding two cards like they’re one. For instance, the zigzag illusion of Robert Harbin which involves pulling a girl’s torso to one side and restoring it again, is actually quite simple in its method but it took Harbin a lifetime to devise it. It was an act of genius to come up with that idea but once performed it was very easy to copy and within five weeks someone over in America was doing it.

With film do you think that CGI might eventually replace magic altogether?

In terms of my own experience of working on Harry Potter, the Director, Alfonso Cuarón, was really keen to include physical magic. He wanted the magic to be part of that world. He also had a wonderful Puppeteer called Basil Twist who did puppetry underwater and some of that was used for the Dementors.

I suppose if you rely on CGI you don’t get quite the same response from the actors. Certainly for one of the scenes
where all the kids were meant to have been to “Zonko’s Joke Shop” and had to do tricks on each other it wouldn’t have had the same impact if it was achieved by CGI.

If you could go back and see one of great magicians of the past, which one would you choose?

I suppose I would love to have seen Houdini, because he was the living legend. I wonder whether he was any good. How much of it was hype? I’d love to have seen some of David Devant’s illusions, like the Mascot Moth, which is meant to be the most amazing disappearance of a person on the stage. I sometimes wonder how much of that was romanticised. I suspect the magic was pretty good but some of the pace of the presentation would probably seem very odd to us now.

Daniel Radcliffe wrote the introduction for your book. How did that come about?

I was teaching Danny Radcliffe for the film and he got into magic for a while. I thought of the idea of the book because I’d always take an old book along and I’d tell him a story about one of the Magicians. I suppose I hadn’t really taught anyone like that before. He’s such an enthusiastic kid, and so intelligent and responsive so that’s when I started to think of the idea of doing a book. It was fairly casually that I asked him whether he would write the introduction, and he actually wrote the introduction quite a long time ago before I’d written most of the book.

Thank you Paul Kieve for talking to Write Away.

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Interview with Paul Kieve for the children’s magazine Kraze Club.

You couldn’t really dream these things up and I get loads of ideas from them. The stories of the magicians are really mad – like The Great Lafayette whose closest friend was a dog – a little hound called Beauty.  She would get her own three course dinner served at the table and had her own miniature sofa and porcelain bathtub! And if you visited the great magician at home you would see a plaque by his front door that said ‘The more I see of man the more I like my dog’.

So lots of the ideas are really from history – and then I love to dream up funny situations too, Just the idea of bringing back a performing troupe from 1900 and landing them in a busy London street 100 years later leads to lots of funny thoughts.

Did you always want to be a writer and what made you write your first book?

Well ,Hocus Pocus is my first book.  I didn’t really think I’d be a writer – I always thought I was more of a hands-on person who likes making things in 3D. But my father wrote a couple of books and I recently discovered that I attempted to write a book when I was 8.  It wasn’t very good and I never finished it!
I had the idea for Hocus Pocus while I was teaching Daniel Radcliffe who I’d met on the set of Harry Potter.  I’d always talk to Dan about the stories behind the great  magicians as well as tech him the tricks and he was really interested in that stuff.  Once I’d thought of the idea he kindly agreed to write the introduction.

How old were you when you performed your first trick?

When I was about 8 or 9  I borrowed a trick out of my brother’s magic set.  The first trick I invented was a way of making it look like my leg had fallen of.  I got a cardboard tube and pushed it up a spare pair of trousers and rested a shoe on the floor at the end.  Then I sat on my bed with my real lower leg hidden under me.  I called my mum and when she came into the room I moved a bit and it looked like my leg had fallen off.  Mum looked a bit shocked and then just told me to get on with my homework!  At school I was more of a practical joker – I was in quite a mischievous group and we were always thinking up silly things like smuggling crane flies into the classroom in a jar and then letting them all out in the middle of a French class.

How did you advise the crew of Harry Potter with their magic tricks?

I was the first magician to work on any of the films, so I had to do long demonstrations called ‘show and tell’ presentations to demonstrate all the possible things I could help them with.  One of these demonstrations was actually held on the set of Hogwarts Hall, and amongst other things I made a ball float all the way down it and back again.  The designer of the film, Stuart Craig, saw it and thought it would be great to have in the Astronomy room as if one of the model planets had escaped from the cupboard and was floating around – and the floating balls in that scene ended up a big feature.    The original folding Marauder’s map I made up at home on a plain white model version and then I took that one in to the studio and worked on the real one. One of the things I suggested was a wizard reading a newspaper by candlelight – and to created more light the candles started to multiply in the wizards’ fingers.  It was a piece of magic that had to be done by sleight of hand – that means just the quickness of the fingers.  The director really liked it and it was just easier for me to do it myself than for anyone else to try learning how to do it, so I ended up in the film – appearing as a wizard in The Three Broomsticks pub.

How long did it take you to research all the magicians in Hocus Pocus?

In some ways I’ve been researching them all of my life.  When I was in Edinburgh about 10 years ago doing my show up there I met an elderly magician called Mac Wilson who was an expert on The Great Lafayette.  He took me to the place where he is buried with his dog, and Mac got me really fascinated with that story.  And as Lafayette had accidentally burned down a theatre which stood on the site of the one I was performing in I was extra careful with my fire tricks!  Some of the magicians in the book are people I’ve always been fascinated with – Devant invented the most amazing tricks that are still legendary with magicians today, and I was always fascinated with the French Magician Robert Houdin  – many years ago I saw this beautiful clock which had no cogs or wheels – just a transparent glass face – by the hands still worked.  Houdin had built it over 150 years ago long before computers – I was fascinated!  But writing the book allowed me to research all of my favorites even more, and I looked in old copies of the Hackney local paper to see when they appeared at The Hackney Empire theatre.

What advice would you give to someone who wanted to be a magician or write about magic

Firstly – you’ve made a great choice – learning magic is not only a truly fascinating hobby that other people will enjoy too, but it’s a great ice breaker – a wonderful way of introducing yourself to people.  It’s also an international language and is a great thing to boost your confidence!  The first advice I’d give them is to get a hold of a copy of Hocus Pocus!! Now I would say that – but seriously, I’ve tried to integrate all the most important things about learning magic into the book – the tricks are only a part of it – the presentation, the way you do it is just as important as the tricks themselves.

Secondly I would suggest they try and watch other magicians perform –  nowadays you can do this easily online – go to youtube and try typing in some of these names and watching their magic:  Doug Henning, David Copperfield, Lance Burton, Jeff McBride, Juan Tamariz.  It’s not the same as seeing them live but it’s a start!  There are some great magic shops online and all over the place – look in your Yellow Pages and see if there’s a magic shop near you.  And you could join a magic society such as the International Brotherhood of Magicians – or aybe the junior Magic Circle.  I took up magic at the age of 10 and it’s taken me to over 50 countries and introduced me to friends all over the world – I can’t imagine a better hobby! Writing about it – well I think you should try doing  it before you write about it!

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