Written by Alexis Michalik
Translated by Waleed Akhtar
Design by Simon Kenny
Lighting Design by Matt Haskins
​Sound Design by Yvonne Gilbert
Magic Consultant Ben Hart
Assistant Director Sam Edmunds

In 1984, as the France vs Yugoslavia match unfolds on TV, a man meets a woman in a Parisian café. He is returning a bag that she lost in the metro, but he doesn’t tell her he stole it… Instead, he tells her the story of Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, watchmaker, inventor, and master magician of the 19th century. Together they set out to find a vanished theatre beneath a bank vault in the Boulevard des Italiens, to break into a museum in the Trocadero, to uncover the mystery of the Mechanical Turk, to witness the birth of the kinetograph… and to delve ever deeper into the Art of Illusion.
Alexis Michalik’s The Art of Illusion won three Molière Awards when it premiered in 2014. A Franco-British actor, writer and director, his other plays include Le Porteur d’histoire, Edmond and Intra Muros.