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.

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After being asked to create magic effects for a 1991 production of The Invisible Man at Theatre Royal Stratford East, magician Paul Kieve found himself in a theatrical niche which blossomed into a career. Not only has he worked on big budget productions including The Lord Of The Rings, The Witches Of Eastwick, Theatre Of Blood and current touring show Batman Live, he also has the honour of being the person to have taught Harry Potter magic.

Now working on West End show Ghost The Musical, the theatrical illusionist tells Caroline Bishop about the art of making a person vanish live on stage.

Ghostly experience

I had seen the film Ghost and I remembered being fond of it. But I suppose I had a memory of it as being a bit cheesy. But when I watched it again and read the script, the thing that really sprung out straight away was this immensely powerful story and how it’s like a spine through the piece. I just thought, this is going to make such a terrific musical.

Ghost The Musical uses optical magic and effects, meaning you actually see things on stage; you see someone’s hand pass through a solid coke can, you see somebody walk through a door. They’re not suggested – you don’t put someone behind a curtain and then the curtain falls and they’re gone – you see it happen before your eyes. They are the sort of effects that I was fascinated by as a kid, and so was Matthew Warchus. They are the most difficult to achieve in terms of sight lines and shape of the set.

A disappearing art

The whole point of why I think I like doing magic within a story is you get the impact of someone suddenly appearing and vanishing, it’s not just a magic trick, it’s actually Sam appearing, the dead boyfriend of Molly appearing before her for the last time after two and a half hours of story and emotional investment by the audience. On the first preview Matthew came up and said ‘I’ve never seen somebody crying and applauding at the same time’. There’s a very interesting thing happening there.

It sounds a bit pretentious to say it, but magic is an incredibly profound form, it’s at the centre of religion and the centre of existence. The magician originally was a very powerful figure. You don’t think of magic as provoking an emotional response. On its own it can’t really do that but if you put it into a story suddenly that ‘appearance’ becomes the appearance of a dead soul and the ‘vanish’ becomes the final departure into the afterlife. But as a performer, having done my time doing close-up magic at corporate functions, nothing could be less magical than going up to a group of pissed lawyers at a Christmas party and have them try and grab a pack of cards. I feel quite lucky to have the opportunity to work at this end of the scale.

Starting out

I don’t think you think far ahead as a kid. I just said, I am not going to go to university, I am going to become a professional magician. I was so obsessed with it and so sure of myself that that was what I was going to do that no one was going to persuade me otherwise. I left school and of course then it’s like oh right ok, how do I go about doing this then? At that time there was a circuit in London that you could work in, there was one called Xenon in Piccadilly, and you could work there as an act and you went on and did a five minute spot at about 01.30 in the morning to slightly drunk disco dancers, between Gloria Gaynor and Frankie Goes To Hollywood. You had to work to disco music because people wanted to carry on dancing.

My act was always visual and quite compact, with lots of things happening. My big dream at that time was to work in Las Vegas and do that sort of circuit and be a spectacular illusion act.

I was in a double act for about five years, we travelled around the world, and then I was asked to do The Invisible Man at Stratford East when I was 23. Ever since then I’ve done more behind the scenes than in front of it.

Luck vs hard work

I love that phrase ‘a lifetime of preparation meeting a moment of opportunity’. When Stratford East called me in at that age I was absolutely petrified. I can remember being virtually ill doing The Invisible Man because of the responsibility, and [writer/director] Ken Hill was quite a hard task masker, but it was brilliant training. I ended up working with Ken Hill over a period of three years on different versions of it. But at the point they phoned me up I had already spent six or seven years completely absorbed in this field of visual illusion and even though I wasn’t experienced at working on stage plays I was lucky that Ken Hill was confident enough to trust me.

Harry Potter was an amazing one to get. I remember meeting Daniel Radcliffe on the set and him being very keen to learn magic, and I started what is a very long friendship. I met him in 2003, when he was 13. He was incredibly focused and enthusiastic. He wasn’t naturally the most dextrous kid. But he was incredibly determined and fascinated and engaged, and a very fast learner.

I think I’ve been lucky in that I haven’t had to constantly clamour for work and look for lucky breaks. I’ve worked virtually my whole life. Ever since leaving school in 1985 I’ve more or less kept in work. It’s time for me to retire really!

Magical exploits

I did Theatre Of Blood at the National Theatre [in 2005]. Working with [designer] Rae Smith – who won the Tony for War Horse – is one of the most joyful things because she’s such an incredible facilitator. Jim Broadbent played a hammy old actor who murders his critics one by one in the style of Shakepearean plays, and I did all the murders. I didn’t ever think I would get the chance to put a live poodle in a liquidiser at the National Theatre. We didn’t really do it, but the shock and horror of the audience as we apparently did it… It’s just interesting how easily you can shock an audience; they gasped and laughed at the same time. There was so much stage blood used in that show that the whole of the backstage of the Lyttelton smelt of candy floss.

I was on holiday in Cuba and The Lord Of The Rings was running in the West End and I got a text from Matthew [Warchus] and it said ‘Bilbo didn’t vanish! What happened?’ It was like, ‘well I forgot to mix the potion in the glass at eight o’clock in the evening!’ Of course it was a very complicated thing and I bet somebody just didn’t plug a light in or something. That was one of my favourite ever messages.

The job comes with a lot of responsibility – not like being a brain surgeon, let’s get it in perspective – but my stuff only works when all the details are there and there’s a very high chance that it won’t work because of that. It is fun and I enjoy the challenge of it, but it’s fun that comes with quite a lot of anxiety because I want it to work and also people come to me more and more expecting something that is unique. I can’t necessarily churn out something I’ve done before and it’s also meant to look astonishing and baffling.

But I think I am blessed that I have something that basically was a childhood interest and fascination and I feel very lucky that I have the chance to put these things on stage.

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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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