Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Comedy magician Pete Heat is back at the festival, appropriately in one of the hottest rooms of the Fringe, which can't be doing wonders for our appreciation of his craft. For some reason it's a lot harder to be astounded when you've got sweat running down your back.

Heat's bag is magic tricks – mostly card tricks – interspersed with comedy routines, both of which are performed to a fairly high standard, although the show is slightly less than the sum of its parts. He's a perfect foil for a casual audience but unlikely to knock out aficionados of either artform. 

I'm far from the first person to suggest this, but there's a lot of Noel Fielding in his persona as well as in his look (the greying indie disco haircut and ostentatious matching tracksuit says all that it needs to).
His energy of a surreal, vaguely glam-rock wideboy actually makes perfect sense as a personality for a magician. If you think about it, it's almost more surprising that  Fielding doesn't already do magic. 

The key for this show is that Heat doesn't want you to suspend your disbelief – he encourages the audience to try to figure out how he does his tricks, and has some fun by repeatedly walking us to the edge of an explanation before pulling back. 

They don't seem super hard to work out though. If you can't see the sleight of hand happening at the time, you can usually think back and figure out when a given switch was made, partly because a lot of the tricks follow the 'sealed envelope' model, which involves the performer previously having written down something that an audience member says spontaneously. Although whether you know how he does the trick or not, you'll likely still be impressed with the ingenuity of the subterfuge.

Between tricks, there's a lot of the usual magic show gubbins about 'truth in a post-truth world' and whether we can ever truly trust our senses, which always feels like hot air. 

Heat delivers this stuff with a welcome dash of humour, but the comedy isn't strong enough to negate the feeling you get at busking shows, where most of your time is spent shifting from foot to foot, waiting for the performer to stop talking and dutifully amaze you.

Review date: 14 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Tim Harding
Reviewed at: Pleasance Dome