Dave Reubens is very much dressed for the part. He arrives wearing a black T-shirt covered in white ghosts and ghouls, black denim three-quarter-length trousers, black trainers and black socks.
Yet an agreeable hour spent in the company of the Edinburgh-based man in black, whose Welsh twang derives from his upbringing in Cardiff, is far from the murkiness associated with the dark arts.
Reubens, 45, weaves his whimsical magic show around his great grandfather, who was from Burnley in Lancashire – where Reubens was born – and who belonged to a secretive society of magicians. Late-night games of cigar and brandy-influenced sessions of Russian roulette are conjured up as Reubens creates a historical backdrop for his own love of magic and the people who inhabit its world.
These include his 20th-century hero Melvin Burkhart, an American circus sideshow entertainer and amateur boxer known as “the human blockhead” for driving a large steel spike up his nose with a hammer, whose bizarre black-and-white image is projected onto an on-stage screen in a section called “anatomical wonders”.
This being freaky magic, Reubens is joined on stage by a succession of eager audience members to engage in a variety of tricks which range from deft displays of extrasensory perception to a couple of delightfully daft stunts involving, variously, a staple-gun being applied to his face and a nail tapped up his nose with a claw hammer. In one routine, labelled “speaking with the dead”, he is assisted by the bearded Phil from Philadelphia, an up-for-it sceptic who is encouraged to “caress” an urn in the quest for a connection with the afterlife and who is high-fived for his spirited efforts.
It’s still being honed but is well delivered by the congenial Reubens, a full-time magician, who has to contend with the sound of rock music bleeding through the walls on a couple of occasions. “The best you can do is make a bit of a joke about it. When you’re trying to do something spooky it doesn’t help,” he said sportingly later.
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