Comedy review: Philip Escoffey: Six Impossible Things Before Dinner

THE regular appearances of stunt magicians, mind-readers and psychics on television may have inured live audiences to the skill involved in the realms of professional magic. That's a shame, because it perhaps takes longer than it should to realise just how singularly gifted an entertainer Philip Escoffey is.

His work is all theatre, of course, but he at least tries to generate a bit of circumstantial tension amid the crowd by requesting that supernatural "believers" and sceptics identify themselves. It helps that he clearly doesn't regard himself with the irritating faux seriousness of a Derren Brown or a David Blaine, either. The crisply turned-out Escoffey looks like a middle manager who's loosened his tie for a few drinks with the staff after work and, like the similarly styled Jimmy Carr, this stiff faade hides a sharp wit that cuts down every heckle or backchat before it even reaches its prime.

The central conceit of the show is that Escoffey will be showing us six impossible things prior to our dinner time. He even has a card at the side of the stage keeping count, such is his confidence. Yet, at the same time, he tries to overtly distance himself from those who conform to traditional wood-touching symbols of good and bad luck and, even worse, horoscopes. In fact, experimenting on the person with the worst luck in the crowd and setting out to foil Mystic Meg's predictions form the basis for two of Escoffey's set-pieces.

And what set-pieces they are. Escoffey's patter is occasionally overly leading, but the tricks speak for themselves. Not to give too much away, he builds up a most random sequence of events (with the use of a brick flung at unsuspecting audience-members, rather worryingly) and then proceeds to decode them in spectacular fashion.

His battle, he says, is simply to unhinge ideas of what is possible and impossible among the minds of his audience. That might be an overly hyperbolic goal, but he is certainly a master of the unexplained – that the last impossible discovery is made by the audience themselves simply crowns a highly entertaining show.

• Until 25 August. Today 5:20pm