Festival of Ideas: Close-up

World Premiere

Close-up is a brief magic performance on headphones, for one spectator at a time.

Inside a working café, surrounded by unsuspecting customers, magician Vincent Gambini invites you to sit at a table and watch a 10-minute performance. In front of your very eyes, playing cards transform inexplicably and sugar cubes vanish without a trace. But as you listen to the magician’s pre-recorded voice and the sounds of the café on headphones, the line between reality and fiction becomes increasingly thin: is this a real café, or a film set filled with actors?

Combining expert sleight-of-hand with the dreamlike nature of cinema, Close-up invites you to briefly reimagine everyday life as an uncanny illusion.

Supported by Farnham Maltings and Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts.