Things aren’t quite as they seem though, and before long, April and December have fallen down a rabbit hole of historical intrigue involving nineteenth-century illusionist, magician and watchmaker Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, and the creation of, amongst other things, the original kinetograph, an early example of the motion picture camera. The Gallic whimsy factor is sky high from the get-go as orphaned pickpocket December meets pregnant April (yes, those really are their names) in a Parisian restaurant to return her bag which he claims to have found on the Metro but which he in fact stole. It fails to make anything especially gripping out of its parallel stories. Unfortunately, Alexis Michalik’s award-winning 2014 Le Cercle des Illusionistes, re-titled The Art of Illusion for English-speaking audiences and staged with considerable verve and invention by director Tom Jackson Greaves, proves too episodic and elliptical to really connect with. If atmosphere, quirkiness and a rock solid belief in the power of storytelling were enough by themselves to carry a full-length piece of theatre, then Hampstead’s first offering of the year in the Downstairs space would be an unabashed winner. Bettrys Jones and Brian Martin in The Art of Illusion
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