‘Magic is like chocolate cake. If it’s a really rich dark chocolate cake, then that’s lovely and you have a few bites of it but you wouldn’t eat the whole cake. Magic is like cookery: not too much salt, not too much sugar. It’s all about getting the right balance.’ Ben Hart has thought a lot about his art and how to structure the perfect set. Let’s face it, he knows what he’s talking about having been in the magic game for many years, with a decade of touring shows behind him as well as a notable appearance as a finalist on Britain’s Got Talent in 2019.  

_{Picture: Matt Crockett}

His impressive illusions and subtle sleight-of-hand may be wondrous and jawdropping, but Hart isn’t in this simply to provide unadulterated thrills. For him, magic should actually say something. ‘All great artists reference the richness of their inner world,’ he notes. ‘It’s normal for a songwriter to quote a poet and to find interconnections across the arts. But traditionally, it has been the case that a magician tells empty stories: here’s a card trick about nothing. And that’s a waste of the power of the magic trick. I see no reason why a performer can’t be doing work that is saying something about politics or the environment.’

As an ode to Ben Hart’s love of structure, we end where we started, with another of his analogies which sums up the work he puts on a stage. ‘My friends laugh at me because I always talk in metaphor. But it’s true. I think that a memorable magic show is like a dinner party: good intro, nice icebreakers, and at the end there’s a wicked game. The audience comes into the theatre and I am the conductor of the space and they’re all my musical players. We’re going to make something special together.’ 

The Garden Of Unearthly Delights, Rundle Park/Kadlitpina, Rundle Road, 17–19 February, 21 February–19 March, 7pm.