Gig review by Steve Bennett at Wilton's Music Hall, London

Time-travelling magicians Morgan and West are back in their spiritual home, Wilton’s Music Hall in the East End of London. For they, too, evoke late 19th-Century elegance with their frock-coats and well-manicured facial hair.

Costumes aside, they slightly downplay the Victoriana. This is not a highly stylised performance, but they nevertheless largely eschew modern technologies to present the sort of entertainment Mr Houdini would have recognised. Indeed, Rhys Morgan has one of the illusions the great escapologist made famous: the East Indian Needle Trick that involves swallowing a handful of sharp implements, only to pull them out of his mouth strung along a thread. Ouch.

Our nimble-fingered prestidigitators offer their take on card tricks – the teleportation routine being a particular head-scratcher – sawing a man in half and on cup-and-ball conjuring, which they jokingly explain by the decidedly non-Victorian theories of quantum supposition. It’s in keeping with their tendency to describe their set-ups in an ironically highfalutin manner, giving each trick a sense of occasion. 

A couple of these routines were in their last show, which played this venue two years’ back… but to be fair it does take slightly longer to perfect a trick than to knock out a pun. And while the sleights of hand are, by definition, usually hidden, the duo have one section which makes explicit their jiggery-pokery, with everyone but the poor sap on stage let in on the trick.

Most impressive are their demonstrations of mentalism, not least the determination of the exact amount of money dropped into a glass from only the sound it makes, and its even more impressive follow-up with a credit card. That said, a trick in which Rob West determines whether four volunteers are thinking of a hope or a fear is either clumsy or fumbled, as it ends on a decided anticlimax.

That’s out of character as the pair are generally slick performers, with the sort of tight banter and shared wit you get from a decade performing together. Audience members are plucked from their seats with efficiency, and the pair pick up each others’ thoughts seamlessly.

While many magicians are trying to reinvent their art as burlesque or something darker, Morgan and West present – as might be expected from their premise – a fairly traditional, family-friendly magic show. Albeit one with elegant flourishes and an engaging humour.

• Morgan & West are at Wilton’s Music Hall until Saturday, and then on tour. Website.

Review date: 25 Apr 2018
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett