Close-up workers can make the leap to children’s magic with the KIDS KOMMANDO ACT
Jeff McBride released his Commando Act on video a number of years ago. It was a brilliant idea. It was an entire act that he could carry as hand-luggage on a flight. The biggest prop was his linking rings. If his luggage got lost Jeff could still perform.
Around that time I was beginning to pare back on my children’s act. This was purely pragmatic. If I am going out to do a show, I like to do …

This is the final of a series of three essays that Owen Lean has graciously allowed us to publish on the site. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have, please comment and tell me what you think. I would now like to formally thank Owen for allowing us to use his three essays, and hopefully we will be seeing more from him here in the future!
Hello! I have loads of money. Seriously I’m absolutely rolling in it, i have cash coming up to my eyeballs. I mean …

This is the second of a series of three essays that Owen Lean has graciously allowed us to publish on the site. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have, please comment and tell me what you think
“These metaphysics of magicians and necromantic books are heavenly… a sound magician is a mighty god!” – Christopher Marlow: Dr Faustus
According to legends, Doctor Faustus, a professor at Wittenburg university in the late seventeenth century, having achieved the pinnacle of scholastic achievement made a diabolic contract with Mephistopheles, the servant of …

This is the first of a series of three essays that Owen Lean has graciously allowed us to publish on the site. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have, please comment and tell me what you think
What is it you first think of when you think of magic?
Got an answer? OK now imagine that you’d read the question before you became a magician. What would you have thought of? Would it have had anything to do with cards, silks, coins, doves or whatever it is we tend …

What follows is an effect that I developed independently from anyone else, it is what got me on to the TV Show, Glas Vegas. I have never seen this in print or has anyone I’ve told credited someone else with the same effect. I am sure someone has done it before as it is just a presentation of a stock idea in mentalism, that of lie detection. The influences for this effect are Lennart Green and, at an unconscious level, Derren Brown. The basis of it is based on a …