When you boil it down, most magic is either guessing a right answer, or making something appear, disappear, or do something it shouldn’t be able to: the rest is the presentation. And Tom Brace presents with an infectious joy.
The show’s opening is deliberately bamboozling, with Brace appearing with gaffer tape wrapped round his head yet somehow making his meaning known to the audience as he delivers his first trick. That sense of never quite knowing what is going to happen but that it will definitely be entertaining runs throughout this show.
There are fun takes on three card monte, mind reading, and a stunning whole-audience guess the number routine that bundles us into the interval all muttering about how it might be done. (I have my theories, but I’m going with magic.)
There is lots of gentle audience interaction, that Brace handles with impressive agility – even when, as with this evening’s performance, it goes massively off piste when a “phone a friend” routine takes several unexpected turns. We still get the big reveal at the end too.
He doesn’t – spoiler alert – actually saw himself in half, but there are plenty of impressive, intriguing, and innovative tricks that more than make up for that.
The show’s schtick is that the performance is his audition for induction for what is elliptically refer to (presumably for legal reasons) as the “magical hall of fame”. While Brace might not quite be up there with some of the luminaries he namechecks quite yet, he’s definitely well on his way.
- Tom Brace was at Norwich Theatre Playhouse on Thursday 18 June 2026. Touring nationally, including Cambridge Junction on 11 July 2026 and Pleasance, Edinburgh, 5-28 August 2026.