'It's a matter of perception. The hands of time turn at the same speed for everyone. Yet a child waits what seems to be an eternity for summer, whilst an old man watches a year pass in the blinking of an eye.'

It's 1984, and as France play Yugoslavia in the Euros, a man meets a woman in a Parisian cafe. He's returning a bag that she lost on the Metro, but he doesn't tell her he stole it...

Instead, he tells her the story of Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin, watchmaker, inventor, and master magician of the nineteenth 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.

Le Cercle des illusionnistes by Alexis Michalik premiered in Paris in 2014 and won several Moliere Awards. The Art of Illusion, Waleed Akhtar's English translation, opened at Hampstead Theatre, London, in December 2022, directed by Tom Jackson Greaves.