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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There are but a small handful of magicians who are involved in creating magic effects for use in non-magic stage and film productions, and Paul Kieve is the busiest of these in the UK. Productions he has worked on include The Invisible Man, Scrooge, The Witches of Eastwick, The Woman in White as well as opera, ice shows, and the film Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Paul came second in the 1985 Magic Circle Young Magician of the Year contest, and last year was the winner of the David Berglas Award from the British Magical Society. With his book Hocus Pocus about to be published this autumn, Paul was kind enough to pry a few moments from his schedule for a chat.

Matthew Field: Where did you get the background in theatre? Were you interested in acting or directing?

Paul Kieve: I got the theatre background from my mum, who was a child actress when she was up in Manchester. She always wanted to be a professional actress. My father said that she had to choose between acting and him, so she chose him. I suppose it’s good she did or I wouldn’t be around! But she never totally gave up. She started a family business. My father was a lecturer and then at the age of 40 my mum decided to pull out of the family business and go back to drama school. She set up her if her own theatre company, The East End Theatre Company

M: What was your introduction to magic?

P: My older brother, Mark, took me to Alan Alan’s magic store. I remember seeing Doug Henning on television, and I was hugely influenced by that. And that was also the best era of The Paul Daniels Show, when all the amazing acts were appearing. Everyone wanted to be Lance Burton. I wanted to be a cross between Jeff McBride, Lance Burton and the Pendragons, probably like everyone else. I wasn’t particularly interested in comedy magic, which I suppose was unusual.

M: Were you getting instruction in magic at that time?

P: My parents had contacted the Ilford Magic Society they put me in touch with a man called Peter Werth. He was the first to tell me to throw away my Tenyo tricks and to go to International Magic and buy a set of Linking Rings – one of the best bits of advice I was ever given. I was entirely fascinated by the Zig Zag. That was the trick that got me into stage illusions. I ended up building my own in school, in woodwork class. I didn’t have an act; I just wanted the box. And then I persuaded my sister, Karen, to assist me and we did local charity shows, a 45-minute act.

M: At what point did you decide to compete in The Magic Circle Young Magician of the Year contest?

P: Redding Junior Day was going on at this time and they had a competition and I went into it with my sister. It was the day of my seventeenth birthday (in October 1984) and we won it. We had never even thought about winning, we just thought it would be fun to do it. And from there we entered The Magic Circle contest. The most significant thing that happened when I was in the sixth form at school was getting invited to double in on a pop video by the singer Sade, who at that point was not known at all. This was her first single, titled Your Love Is King.

M: You had achieved success in an area that eludes many other magicians. You were in the right place at the right time.

P: I think that’s definitely what happened. The Sade video became a huge hit and my hands performing card tricks were quite featured. Sade would talk about me on TV and radio interviews. I had such fun filming the video that I thought, you know what, I want to do this. I wasn’t sure before that if I wanted to do it as a career. I was invited to perform the Zig Zag on Blue Peter in 1984, I got a TV spot on the TV show Illusions, and I came second in The Magic Circle Young Magician of the Year, so I was on a bit of a roll. That was the same year I did my A-levels , so I left school and said, ‘Hey, I’m going to be a professional magician’, whatever that meant.

M: When did you form the Zodiac Brothers?

P: I originally did my act with a girl assistant. I was a resident support act in Jersey to an incredible variety of top-of-the-bill performers. I was doing a silent act – Fantasio Candles, Sub Trunk. I had known Lawrence Leyton, who had been a young magician of the year two years before me, and he asked me whether I’d like to do a double act. After my girl assistant left I thought I’d try it for two or three months. The two or three months turned into four and a half years. Then John Fisher picked up on us and produced us for The Ronn Lucas Show. It was a really big break that John Fisher was interested in us.

M: The first I came across your name was in 1991 in a report I read in the States about the production of The Invisible Man for which you designed the effects.

P: I had some very lucky strokes of fate, or whatever you want to call it – maybe timing. One of the most remarkable pieces of timing was our split up the double act in the summer of 1991. Literally the following day after our final contract on the QE2 I had a call from the Theatre Royal at Stratford East saying they had a production of The Invisible Man, which Ken Hill had written. I suppose out of sheer ignorance of the field of magic in theatre at the time I didn’t know how to do the show except by full-out magical ways. And Ken Hill, who has to take a lot of the credit, was the one who said, hey, I’m going to give this guy a chance to do what he wants, and he was 100% behind me.

M: How many effects were in that show?

P: By the time we came into the West End there were 48.

M: That’s an astonishing number.

P: Ken for a start was very, very interested in theatre tricks. He supplemented some of the budget for the show with some of his own money. He basically invested in some of the bigger props (such as Thomas Marvel vanishing in a box at the end) so we didn’t have the limitation of the Stratford East budget. Not that we supplemented the budget that much, because in the end the big hits in the show were bent pieces of coat hanger and invisible thread.

M: Did the floodgates open after that?

P: It wasn’t exactly like that, but I did within a couple of weeks get asked to work with the Royal Shakespeare Company on their Christmas show, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which was their main house production at the Barbican. So I went from Stratford East to the RSC in one leap, and it was also around that time that David Wood contacted me to work on his adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches , the third show I worked on.

M: Scrooge was another big success.

P: Yes. I’ve worked on Scrooge more times than any other show – fourteen or fifteen different productions around the world. Composer Leslie Bricusse has always been very hands-on and involved with it. He wrote a wonderful new piece of music for one of the illusions I put in, a kind of Vanity Fair ghost through the mirror. He’s always been very interested in and supportive of all the magic stuff.

M: And you made the transition from theatre to film with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

P: This was another interesting bit of timing. It was very much the initiative of the director, Alfonso Cuaron, who directed the third, and only the third, movie. He was interested in the fact that I was used to working with directors, and he wasn’t a big fan of CGI, computer generated graphics. He wanted there to be a live magic element in the film, I think partly because of his Mexican background – really interesting circus and live stuff. I had to do a show-and-tell a two-hour demonstration for all the departments including the director, producers, the triple Oscar-winning designer. It was terrifying.

M: They probably had no idea what was possible using magic.

P: They didn’t, but I felt like it wasn’t just me auditioning, I was auditioning for live magic. It was only when I started to work on my presentation that I realised how much magic isn’t ‘magical’ in a Harry Potter sense! You can’t do 98% of things because they involve a box being opened or closed, but there are a few things from our worls that remain magical even in Hogwarts such as certain effects with fire , but mainly animations, and floating effects. I taught some magic to the children in the film for one scene and after the day’s filming Daniel Radcliffe [who plays Harry Potter] came up to me with a very earnest expression on his face and said, ‘I can’t believe you’ve taught everyone else magic apart from me’. I offered to tutor Daniel in magic if he was serious about learning. So, going the way I’d learned, I got him a set of Linking Rings. He’s a very hard-working kind of kid. I’m very interested in magic history and I wanted to give him a bit of background to the magic, so every time I’d go over there I’d take an old book, like the Goldston Locked Book, or Houdini’s Handcuff Secrets, or some book with a funny story to it like Jarrett. I found that combining the stories of magic with tricks was effective, and Daniel really became hooked and I thought, you know, this is not a bad idea for a book, to do this overlap of history and effects.

M: And in fact you did write that book, and it’s about to be published: Hocus Pocus.

P: It will be out October 1st, published by Bloomsbury, the publisher ofHarry Potter. It is already available on Amazon and Daniel Radcliffe has written the introduction.

M: The cover states it is ‘a tale of magnificent magicians and their amazing feats’, so it is that the combination of history and tricks you described?

P: Yes. This is actually a fiction that’s loosely basedon a version of me, set in my house in Hackney and it’s got a lot of magic history in it, but it’s magic history come to life. The magicians basically come back to life and teach me stuff and through teaching me, they teach the reader. But learning tricks is a small part; it’s a complete story, wonderfully illustrated by Peter Bailey, and it’s being marketed that way – as a fictional book, but there are over 40 tricks that are taught. The other major character in the book is the Hackney Empire. I live around the corner from the theatre and just around the time that I was thinking about the book I was researching when all these magical greats had appeared at that theatre. The Hackney Empire becomes a sort of channelling energy for the book.

M: We are sitting now talking in Covent Garden. Down the street is the Royal Opera House, which is where you were ensconced in a rehearsal room just before we met. What are you doing there?

P: I’m working on a piece called L’Heure Espagnole by Ravel, [performed in March and April], part of a double bill directed by Richard Jones, a famous, avant-garde opera director. It’s a kind of opera farce in which people are hidden in grandfather clocks.

M: You are involved, I would guess, in getting the people in and out of the clocks.

P: It’s normally done with the clocks stood against the back wall. In this version they are isolated in the middle of the stage. The director wanted as much playfulness as possible with people apparently still in the clocks when they’re lifted up in the air.

M: Down the road (almost opposite) is another theatre where something else is going on – Lord of the Rings.

P: I’m quite lucky that these two things have coincided geographically, because L’Heure Espagnole has been in my diary for a year and a half, and Lord of the Rings has only been scheduled at Drury Lane since last summer. So I can be at L’Heure Espagnole in the morning and Lord of the Rings in the afternoon.

M: Lord of the Rings has a cast as big as an army, doesn’t it? It’s a huge production – apparently the largest outside Las Vegas.

P: It’s crazy really. We’ve been in Theatre Royal Drury Lane building sets since January. The first time an audience will go in and see it is the ninth of May. That’s a four month fit-up and technical period. It’s an expensive show just from the perspective of keeping theatre dark for that length of time, let alone the costs of the crew and the physical production. The stage floor is innovative. From above it looks like a dart board, and, if you imagine it, each one of the sections can individually lift and drop and each of the circles revolves. So there are nineteen different revolving lifts. It’s a hugely ambitious piece in lots of ways. It has a cast of 60, it’s all three Tolkien stories in one show, it’s cost a huge amount of money and it has a fairly terrifying running cost. I worked on it last year for its premiere in Toronto but this version is quite different. The producers are keen not to call it a musical but it does have music all the way through it (rather like the way music is used in a film) and there are musical numbers as well.

M: How do you integrate magic effectively into a theatrical experience?

P: The first thing I’d say is that you have to make sure it doesn’t get cut! That may sound flippant, but you have to fight to make sure it doesn’t get pushed into a corner, that it doesn’t get ousted by other factors. It’s always the case that the magic should serve the story. So the best opportunities for me to do magic in a drama are when the emotional and character-development go hand in hand with a strong bit of magic.

M: How difficult is it to work within the context of a production in which magic is just one part? Everyone involved – the costume designer, the lighting director, the choreographer – they all serve two masters, their own area and the ensemble.

P: Including, obviously, what I’m doing. What’s tricky about it, as we know, is that sometimes magic can be very uncompromising. A big part of the job is knowing how to work with the departments.

M: Do audiences today expect theatre to match or exceed what they can see in a movie?

P: I don’t think so at all. I think it all comes down to the storytelling. It all comes down to whether you are emotionally engaged in what you’re seeing. And if the story happens to be about magic or happens to include magical things, which of course a lot of operas and musicals do have, then it’s disappointing if those magic moments aren’t delivered. But people are not used to seeing magic things happen on a stage. So in some ways you can do simple things and people are really impressed by them if you do them theatrically correctly and with the right sort of timing. Even in film I think it comes down to whether you’re emotionally engaged. And that’s one of the difficulties with magic on its own – how do you make people care about what’s happening when it’s difficult to provide any dramatic or emotional journey?

M: You said that you made a decision not to go to university because you wanted to pursue magic. Are you happy you made that decision?

P: I wanted to do an act and I wanted to play Vegas. I don’t want to play Vegas any longer. I feel really lucky to be living in London where there are these opportunities to work in theatre. It’s amazing to me to be working at the Royal Opera House and the Drury Lane Theatre. They are amazing spaces. I feel like I’m always learning because of the diversity of projects I am involved with. I like the fact that I learn through what I work on.

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Earlier this year, Paul Kieve was awarded The David Berglas Award for outstanding contribution to magic. Past recipients of this prestigious trophy have included Paul Daniels, Geoffrey Durham and Alex Elmsley. Researching this feature, I began to realise just how much this laid-back magician with the Mediterranean looks has played a part in modern day magic. Not only is he an accomplished performer (he recently became the only magician in history to appear in “The Proms” in the Royal Albert Hall) and Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe’s personal magic tutor, he is, perhaps, the most prolific and successful magic consultant in UK theatre history!

Paul Kieve has left his magical influence on many major theatre productions over the past fifteen years and this success has led to his
talents being in demand in other areas, too.

The only magic consultant to work on any of the Harry Potter movies, he has continued to skilfully juggle a variety of exciting projects
and yet his name may be relatively unfamiliar to many magicseen readers. I travelled to London in the sweltering heat of mid-July to
interview the man who puts the magic into our entertainment experiences…

Rare magic posters adorn the walls, halls, landing and lounge of Paul’s stylish house in Hackney, London. There is an imposing old book case crammed with magic books that would keep a magic scholar busy for years. Paul is obviously a man who respects magic history and he enthusiastically informs me of specific details from his book collection.

I begin by asking him how he copes with the pressure of having to develop magic effects to order. Surely it cannot be easy to meet deadlines – with the director, cast and financial backers waiting to put on a production?

“I’ve learned how to put myself in a position where I’m most likely to succeed,” says Paul, “When I started out I didn’t know the way theatre budgets, politics and
schedules worked, particularly on big musicals, but now I know how shows are put together and staged and that helps me a lot. I’ve also learned not to commit myself to
things that are truly impossible! In some situations I will go into a meeting and basically say that I will be able to help, but that the producer is employing my expertise
and not necessarily a guarantee of an absolutely specific result. I also make sure that it is understood that my work can only be achieved with co-operation and collaboration from other departments. Having said that, one way or another, I’ve had a good success rate at coming up with what is asked and nobody is more surprised than I am! I do admit that there is pressure, as I’m constantly being asked to come up with things that haven’t, or seemingly haven’t been done before, but I have been working on theatre productions for over 15 years now so I suppose I get used to the demands. Also it’s amazing how many clues can come from what has been done in the past.”

How do you cope with those inevitable mental blocks? “If I get stuck, I try and visualise what I would like the final result to look like. I imagine myself sitting in the audience and how I want it to look from their perspective without getting too hung up on the method.”

Paul seems so relaxed that I don’t doubt that he can cope with anything that stressed Director’s throw at him. But what actually makes great magic within a theatre production?

“The most successful moments are when a strong magic effect co-incides with a dramatic peak. Take the unmasking in The Invisible Man where Griffin takes off his bandages to reveal an invisible head. If that exact effect had theoretically happened earlier in the play at a less important moment in the story it wouldn’t have had the same impact. In “The Invisible Man” the whole first half of the story is entirely built upon the suspense of who this bandaged stranger is. The un-bandaging is where the dramatic and emotional arc is at its highest. If I can deliver a good magic moment at the top of this dramatic climax, then I have my greatest chance of creating a strong and memorable impact.”

I ask Paul how he got the job on The Invisible Man – a production that received rave reviews – not least for over 40 amazing magical effects. “At the time, I was in a magic
double-act called The Zodiac Brothers and we had just finished our last contract. I wanted to move on. I knew that the act would always work, but on ships and overseas. I found the experience of working on cruise ships quite claustrophobic – I didn’t necessarily want a chocolate mint on my pillow every night!”

The very next day, Paul received a call from the Theatre Royal Stratford East where writer and director Ken Hill was planning his next production and it proved to be a very significant moment in his career. “Ken wasn’t afraid of a big challenge. He saw the absurd fun of staging The Invisible Man live. He was cavalier in his approach and had already decided that it could be done with or without a magic designer! His favourite phrase whenever anything seemed to be an insurmountable challenge was: ‘We can just
jig it out of a bit of ply!’”

What does Paul see as the most rewarding aspect of working on a production?

“A really good collaboration between all the departments has resulted in the best experiences I’ve had. A recent example was the 2005 production of “Theatre of Blood” at
the National Theatre in London. The story concerns a hammy Shakespearian actor who murders seven critics that have slammed his performances. All are dispatched in the style of a death from a Shakespeare play. The production was based on the 1970’s film starring Vincent Price.

Says Paul: “I had to create impalements, electrocutions, drownings and dismemberments! The great thing for me about “Theatre of Blood” was that it placed all my effects at critical points of the plot. I got totally immersed in the projects and worked on it solidly for about 3 months. I was in charge of all the murders and blood effects and that was a big learning curve for me. At some of the rehearsals we used literally litres of stage blood and the actors were dressed in white plastic all-in-one protective boiler suits. The floor and walls of the rehearsal room had to be covered in protective plastic. Everything was built inhouse at The National Theatre workshops and the set and costume designer Rae Smith was incredibly helpful. She just helped to make everything work as well as it possibly could. In addition I was working with Improbable Theatre (who were co-producing the play). I had worked with them in 1998 at the Lyric Hammersmith, and they have a great love of visual theatre. Director Phelim McDermott was very keen for the murders to be as horrific and spectacular as possible.”

Oscar-winner Jim Broadbent, probably best known for his movie work with Director Mike Leigh and his role in Moulin Rouge took the lead role and Paul found him a joy to work with. “He was very down-to-earth, a consummate professional who very keen to learn the details. It really was a dream job for me, but the critics didn’t know how to react to it as the whole play not only dealt with their grisly deaths, but speculated that their roles in theatre were irrelevant! The Evening Standard newspaper reviewer, Nicholas De Jongh was vitriolic . However, much of the press praised Paul’s work as the highlight. No lesser journal than The Hollywood Reporter wrote “Illusionist Paul Kieve stages the murders in quite extraordinary fashion. They are as utterly convincing as they are hilariously horrific”

After consistently receiving enthusiastic reviews for his work in theatre productions, Paul received a call that most magicians dream about. He was approached by Director
Alfonso Cuaron to work on Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban. However, it wasn’t simply a matter of saying “yes”, as Paul reveals: “I had to do a two-hour ‘show & tell’
presentation to all the departments gathered together, showing what might be possible using physical magical effects as opposed to computers” says Paul, calmly.

“On that day in Leavesden, near Watford I felt like an ambassador for magic because I was the first magician to be asked onto the set. It was a freezing cold day and I demonstrated more than forty different effects live with another 30 examples from video. After I had finished, they said: What are you doing tomorrow?” Amongst many other things Paul had showed them a number of animation effects and a self-folding bill during his presentation and he his first task was to have a look at the ‘Marauders Map’ which they wanted to magically fold itself up. “My existence on the film was sometimes politically tricky as they had already completed two films with existing computer and special effects teams. I was a new, albeit one-man, department, so I had to tread carefully! In the end the other teams were very helpful to me, particularly John Richardson and the special effects department.”

After having got through the “Show And Tell” and my first couple of scenes, I had to create a second presentation which was actually held on the set of Hogwarts Hall. This was to demonstrate possibilities for a scene where all the kids had been to Zonko’s joke shop (this will mean something to Harry Potter readers!). One of the things I showed was a floating sphere -which I rigged to go the whole length of the hall and back again. Designer Stuart Craig came up with the idea of having a number of spheres floating around The Astronomy Room. So I set up some globes to float around live for the cameras on the set, which was not easy due to the restrictions of lights, camera cranes, and
constantly changing shooting angles.

Paul laughs as he explains that when he demonstrated the original effect he had used a Christmas tree bauble ‘bought for a quid’ from a Hackney newsagent. “The astronomy
room sequence took thirteen days to complete. Working on films there is an unbelievable amount of hanging around,” says Paul, “but when they want you on set you have to be ready to perform instantly!”

We heard that you actually conducted amagic class on set, is this correct? “Yes it is, I held a series of classes over a day, to assess the ability of the kids. Almost all the kids
turned up for one of the sessions – Emma Watson who plays Hermione, The Weasley twins, it was quite surreal. Everyone was there except Daniel Radcliffe, who, of course,
plays Harry Potter – he was busy filming.

When we were doing the scene the following week, he came up to me on the set of Hogwart’s Hall and said: ‘I can’t believe you’ve taught everyone else magic except
me!! So I promised him that I’d teach him whenever there was an opportunity. He was genuinely interested – he’d previously bought a magic set in New York…” So you
started giving him lessons on set? “On the set he has a dressing room, and next door to that is a classroom where he does all of his school studies – that’s where I held the
magic lessons. I really wanted to inspire him as he seemed so keen to learn. He is an exceptionally bright kid and very humble considering the amount of media attention
he has received” continues Paul. “I’d take over an old magic book and tell him a few things about the history, then show him some practical things too. The first lessons were a
couple of hours and then I continued giving him lessons at his family home in Fulham, often for three or four hours at a time.”

Daniel has really got the magic-bug and during the filming of The Prisoner of Azkaban he took tricks on set. He told me the first time he met Emma Thompson he showed her
a trick had learned from me and she screamed – that really helped to break the ice! Towards the end of filming, Paul received a call from the Director: “He asked me if I
could think of a present for Daniel as a ‘wrap’ present. Daniel had been practising the cups & balls with paper cups, so I suggested we get him a professional set. We got him a
beautiful set produced by Brett Sherwood.”

So how is Daniel doing with his magic now? “Well, at present, I’ve more-or-less taught him a lot of what I know when it comes to close-up magic! Daniel told me that
he was in a restaurant and he started doing some close-up magic at the tables…and he went down really well. He was most pleased when a table of Japanese customers failed to recognise him, but responded purely because the magic was done well! Daniel has kindly written the introduction to my forthcoming book on magic.”

Perhaps the most memorable of Paul’s effects in The Prison of Azkaban is where ‘The Marauders Map’ magically self-folds itself – the last effect shot of the movie. Paul
got a call months after he had designed it – and was asked to bring in the long-forgotten map that he had worked on months earlier.

“They asked how long it would take to get to the stage where it could be filmed – the time it would take to transfer my system onto the real Maurauder’s map and I said 2-4 hours.

They asked me to start straight away and that it would be filmed in the afternoon. I designed, made and operated the mechanism. And out of all the stuff I have ever done, I guess it’s The Marauders Map that’s been seen and remembered by the most people,”

Not only was Paul responsible for memorable magical scenes in the movie, he also landed a cameo appearance in ‘The Three Broomsticks section’. As Paul tries to
find me the clip on a huge DVD projection screen in his lounge, he says, “I hope my three seconds are worth it!” But even those three seconds were the result of three days
filming at Shepperton Studios.

Working on perhaps the highest profile movie in the world must have been an amazing experience, and yet there was another blockbuster-project – this time in theatre-land, waiting for him. Twenty-Eight million Canadian dollars (about £14 million) were spent on the mammoth task of bringing The Lord of the Rings to life on stage. This was a project that according to Paul had been bubbling under for many years – even pre-dating the films – and it was always going to be an epic. “They were waiting for a theatre in London to become available,” explains Paul. “The scale of the show was so huge that only three theatres in London were big enough to accommodate it. The producers
were waiting for We Will Rock You to come off at The Dominion, but every time ticket sales flagged and we got ready to go, they would extend the booking period again. Waiting for West End Theatres is an absurd business full of rumour and speculation!. It transpired that Toronto, which has a huge theatre industry, had the perfect theatre – one that had been built specifically to house Miss Saigon. An opportunity arose and so the full English production team was flown out there to make it work with a March 2006 opening date!”

The Princess of Wales Theatre, owned by Toronto’s famous Mirvish family, proved to be perfect, but how on earth do you put The Lord of the Rings on stage? Says Paul: “It
tells the story of all three books in one evening. It’s a play with atmospheric music – composed by a Scandinavian folk group called Vartinna and A R Rahman – the well
known Bollywood composer who wrote the show “Bombay Dreams”. It really is not a traditional musical in any sense – you don’t suddenly get Gandalph singing a song about
the Hobbits and doing a tap Dance. Music is an important part of the story and is referred to by Tolkein in the books, so on the whole it fits into fairly natural places in the story.

“On the first day of rehearsals I was struck by the sheer scale of what we were involved in. There were 250- 300 people in the rehearsal room– 65 actors and musicians
are actually on stage at the same time!”

It took four solid months to assemble all the sets in Toronto. The production is truly epic in every way. Paul was involved in the early creative process and had a number of
effects to achieve. “I had the task of making Bilbo disappear, and of course a number of times when Frodo puts the ring on and vanishes. There is also a scene where Sam
has to cut all the Orcs to pieces, and a 10 minute pre-show section. In terms of my work, although this is physically the largest show I’ve ever worked on, it’s not the biggest
job as far as my contributions go”, says Paul modestly. “It is the sort of production that magicians will love! It’s the equivalent in scale of a Las Vegas Show is a huge visual feast!”

Other members of the creative team include peter Darling who choreographed the stage and film versions of Billy Elliot. The principle creative team were all behind the Oliver Award winning musical “Our House” which Paul worked on in the West End in 2003.

In Toronto, the production came in for criticism, partially for running too long. Will this be the case when it opens in London? “The show has now been re-structured and
shortened. Part of the critical problem in Toronto was that Lord of the Rings was hoped to revive Toronto’s tourism and theatre industry – a large amount of government
money went into it over there. In the end it is only a theatre production, albeit a spectacular one – and it couldn’t possibly live up to what it was expected to”. The show is
set to open at The Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London in June 2007.

As I climb into my taxi to head back to kings Cross Station, I realise just how many pages of my notebook I’ve filled and I’m already starting to worry about the massive
task ahead. How am I going to write a feature on someone who has achieved so much? As the taxi draws away, Paul is leaning out of his office watching the busy street scene at the end of his road. He is unaffected and modest about his success, and you just know that there’s a lot more to come.

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