The MagicThere are so many things wrong with this show I don’t know where to start. I hate to write a bad review, because the sweat and hard work that goes in to any theatrical production should not be dismissed by a single reviewer hunched over their laptop – but I was really quite offended by this play. The script was absurdly out of date and frankly felt misogynistic. Two women left half way through and I have to admit I wanted them to take me with them.

The Magic professes to be a “haunting bittersweet tragedy” about lost love and changing times, but it is simply a mess of clichés, incoherent narrative structure and depressingly lacklustre views of women. Now this is not to say that a piece cannot be wildly sexist, hideous and pervy, but if that’s what you are going for then cast a right sleaze bag as your main guy and make the audience recoil with the horrors of the dark underbelly of the strip club world – don’t cast a frankly un-charismatic actor who tries his best to deliver lines such as “country meadows” to describe his true love, and who does not in any way befit the charming rogue character he has to portray.

This show kept trying desperately to cling on to its message of illusion, the magic of performance, and the thin line between burlesque and stripping – all topics that are ripe for debate and discussion, but the show never asked us anything and the main character lacked any sense of moral culpability – we simply didn’t care because the stakes were never high enough. This man leaves his kids and young wife (arms crossed in the kitchen – I am not joking) only to fall in love with a singer called Anna who has no autonomy and no reality – she “shines like marble in the moonlight” and is constantly alluded to as thin a slip, fragile,  “he could break her in two”, but is somehow possessed with a powerful voice which she seems to lose entirely when she lets him pimp her out to some half-baked dodgy character. It was just so incredulous and lacking in any real struggle of conscience that it was hard to be pulled in or even to care about what was being laid down before me.

A one-man show is a delicate thing. Having seen Fleabag and I Could’ve Been Better at the Edinburgh Fringe only the week before, I was all too aware that these intimate shows require a strong sense of rhythm and imagination, and above all a central performer who knows and owns the world the audience shares with them for what can be a truly powerful hour. The Magic, on the other hand, was a one-man show which was badly written, miss-cast and misjudged, and I am surprised to have seen it programmed at Soho Theatre which usually gives us modern marvels.

The Magic is playing at Soho Theatre until 24 August 2013. For more information and tickets, see the Soho Theatre website.