Ben Hart’s Hex is a clever, funny and genuinely baffling evening of magic, where every trick feels just as impossible as the last.
Magic has always held a particular appeal. Not knowing how it’s done is, for many, rather the point. So there’s no need to explain exactly what Ben Hart does in Hex, except to say that watching him very closely doesn’t help.
This makes reviewing the show slightly difficult. There are things that desperately want to be described, but doing so would rob audiences of the pleasure of seeing them without knowing what is coming. The objects can be given: a fencing sword, a peach, a fan, an egg. What happens to them is another matter.
Hart is not only a magician but an inventor of magic. He creates his own illusions, an authorship that makes Hex feel unmistakably his. Even when he draws on principles of magic that have existed for centuries, the trick that eventually reaches the stage has been pulled apart, rebuilt and made uniquely for Hart. He is interested in making things happen that he hasn’t seen another magician do before. That work has also taken him off his own stage. Hart has designed illusions for theatre, television and film, including work for the Royal Shakespeare Company.
None of this would work nearly as well if Hart weren’t such a good performer. His stage presence is fantastic, but he never strains for attention. He is especially good when the audience gives him something unexpected. His improvisation is quick and dry, and the interruptions and banter are some of the best parts of the evening. At one point he looks at the audience and says, “You’ll watch anything, won’t you?”
He’s right. They will.
Hart also enjoys letting the audience think they’ve caught him. Something seems to go wrong. He acknowledges it. He plays the mistake for a laugh and, for a moment, the audience gets to enjoy the prospect of watching a magician fail at magic. Then he upends the whole thing. It is one of his best qualities as a performer: he knows exactly when to let an audience feel clever.
Hex premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2024, Hart’s tenth year performing there, and was conceived as a collection of favourite pieces from that decade alongside new material. It could easily have felt like a greatest-hits set. Instead, Hart finds a story for it.
He takes the audience back to himself as a boy and to The Discovery of Witches, the first book he tells us drew him into this world. Witchcraft runs through the show, sometimes as story, sometimes as atmosphere and sometimes as a useful excuse for Hart not to explain himself. The tricks become spells. The magician can, when it suits him, become something closer to a witch.
Hart has the right temperament for this. He can make something eerie without becoming portentous about it, then puncture the mood with a joke. The darker material and the comedy feed each other. One gives the other somewhere to go.
And he is properly funny. Not funny-for-a-magician, but fast enough with an audience that you begin waiting for the exchanges almost as much as the tricks. Magic and comedy also turn out to share a useful mechanism: Hart lets the audience make an assumption, gives just enough time to become confident in it, then makes everyone look silly for having done so.
There are moments in Hex when the sheer construction of a trick is impressive. There are others when the effect is so clean that construction is the last thing on the mind. That is where Hart is at his best. The man who designed the illusion disappears and leaves behind something that, for a second or two, simply shouldn’t be possible.
As the audience walks out, Nina Simone’s “I Put a Spell on You” begins to play. And he really does.
This show runs at Underbelly Boulevard until 4th October. Tickets here.