5th April It was fun...and magic

On Sunday TOM and I had a break from our usual routines and had a Sunday afternoon together at the theatre. It was a jolly to the Theatre Royal in Nottingham to watch 'Magic Goes Wrong' the latest spin off from Mischief Theatre. 

Increasingly well known from the couple of series of 'The Goes Wrong Show' that they have now done on BBC, TOM and I were fortunate enough to see them before everyone else jumped on the bandwagon several years ago when The Play That Goes Wrong came to town. It was a show that really surprised us with just how clever and funny it was.

Since then we have seen Peter Pan Goes Wrong and A Comedy About a Bank Robbery so we thought we would give this one, made in collaberation with American magicians, Penn and Teller, a punt. And what a great afternoon it proved to be; a great show with lots of laughs and magic tricks that went both right and wrong and sometimes not exactly when expected.

If you could think of all the types of magic you might see performed, this show featured most of them. There was a supposed psychic called the 'Mind Mangler', who couldn't even read his own mind, card tricks, dead doves, escaping rabbits, levitating bodies, an OTT knife act that ended with lots of blood and several missing limbs, a contortionist, escapology, a woman sawn in half, things that disappeared on cue and also often when they shouldn't, together with large set pieces that like the best magic tricks made us both wonder how they did it.

A multi generational audience really got involved in the spirit of things, with some of the more adult humour involving the large neon lights above the stage occasionally fusing to generate naughty words and phrases that literally passed well above the heads of the jounger audience, who simply lapped up the slapstick. 

And after the past couple of years when laughter has been in such short supply, it was simply great to hear an audience out to get lost in the illusions that they could see but not quite believe. If only TOM could have made the two children sat infront of us, munching the world's loudest sweets, vanish in a puff of smoke, well that really would have been magic.