REVIEW: Master Of The Macabre, The Vaults Waterloo ✭✭

Photo: Jack Sain Master of the Macabre

The Vaults, Waterloo

13 Oct 2015

2 Stars.

Reviewed by James Garden

Buy Tickets

Master of the Macabre, now showing at The Vaults Theatre until 1 November, is a curious and entertaining evening. There are some fun thrills and tricks along the way, but ultimately it sort of falls flat, when it comes to its story and delivery.

The magician, performing under the pseudonym Benedict Barber is clearly good at his hobby (his day job is apparently working for a major telecom firm but he’s taken a three-month sabbatical to practice and perform this show.) While he is a very credible magician, he has made a fatal error as a performer. The glazed eye “macabre” look doesn’t work so well on adults, because it both gives away too much, and yet presents too little. As soon as we see his wide eyed look, and he mentions his “identical twin,” in the first five minutes, we know the big surprise twist before it even happens.

This isn’t entirely his fault, obviously, because he’s got a director and a writer working to make this show function, but they haven’t. Surely a writer knows how to build and raise dramatic questions, but seems that knowledge seems to have disappeared in this work. And same goes to the director—we’re never on side with the guy, because of this wide-eyed pantomime choice, and it reads as one note.

The best magicians, just as the best one man shows, take the audience on a journey outside of themselves, emotionally at least, tying a wonderful knot of a story so that when we it’s revealed that the knot is actually a noose, and it’s around all of our necks and go “oh, ****,” it’s a heart-pounding moment of thrill. If you're going to do crazy, and invite theatre critiques, give us Hannibal Lecter who dances around our minds off the page and the screen-- not an approximation of Bela Lugosi as TV presenter.

That’s not to say his magic isn’t credible, at all. The actual magic stuff he does is very cool and entertaining and genuinely makes you go “how did he do that?”

The people who devised this show, the performer talks about his “dark take” on magic, but we’re in a world where our governments haunt us with boogiemans every day. To ACTUALLY scare us, while doing magic especially, you have to get us on side. Benedict Barber, and his team, unfortunately fail to do this. If you want some great magic tricks, do go along to this show. But if you want to be scared and delighted by that scare, go do something else.

Master Of The Macabre runs at The Vaults in Waterloo until 1 November 2015