Note: This review is from the 2011 Fringe

COMEDY


Showing @ Just the Tonic, 5-28 August @ various times (not 16th)

Back in the 90s, a birthday party wasn’t a birthday party unless the local magician made an appearance. Every trick was politely unremarkable, the same children were always picked to be the magician’s helper to the jealous horror of their friends, and the props were cobbled together at home with a couple of cheap magic shop must-haves thrown in. For all those adults now nostalgically lamenting their lost childhoods, fear not, for a survivor has been discovered: Piff the Magic Dragon.

Piff, however, is no ordinary magician. Created by John van der Put, he won The Magic Circle Close-Up Magician of the Year 2011 and recently appeared on ITV’s Fool Us with Penn and Teller – but you would never know it to look at him. Brilliantly blasé, every trick is done with an unfazed grumpiness so haphazardly that it can be difficult to appreciate some genuinely impressive magic. It’s also a great cover for when the occasional trick goes “wrong”, or is made purposefully obvious and therefore completely unmagical. Van der Put embodies his Piff character wonderfully convincingly, never straying away from his indifferent counterpart, and yet has that unique knack of managing to be likeable at the same time.

With side-splitting laugh after laugh, expect to leave wondering if you’ve just seen a stand-up or a magic show. Recognising that the heyday of truly awe-inspiring magic has been and gone, this fifty-fifty combination gives magic a refreshing new face. It might be green and it sure is reluctant, but it’s a face that accepts that the audience are unlikely to leave open-mouthed and embraces it with ingenious imagination. This is the real magic of Piff the Magic Dragon. This, of course, and the docile Mr Piffles, who is surely the best behaved, most complacent and, of course, magical chihuahua of all time.