Magic in a soggy field

The great Richard Leigh brought two of his fantastic shows to Wigan yesterday for what was intended to be a bank holiday weekend extravaganza in the grounds of a stately home. Six thousand people were expected to come and watch.

Sadly, the event suffered from a bizarre patchiness of organisation. State-of-the-art stage, lighting, sound system and so on, yet no seats for the audience! The performers themselves had to trail round finding what chairs they could lay their hands on. In retrospect, this may have been prescience rather than bad organisation, since of the 6000 only 15 materialised.

My friend Iain Moran and I arrived a quarter of an hour early for the 2pm Sideshow of Wonders, only to discover the organisers had decided the show should start at 1.15 in case it rained. Could they not have mentioned this to the boy on the gate? Or the girls actually in the performance compound who were checking the tickets? We were furious to have missed over half the show (as was the family who hurried in at two o'clock) but we did get there in time to see Richard's phenomenal thumb-tie routine, which is one of my favourites.

Richard Leigh and his thumb-tie

After this, Richard had ten minutes to turn around before going straight into the Big Top show, scheduled for 3.45. Luckily, we were already there or we would have missed this completely. It's a fabulous show, one I hadn't seen before. Many of the illusions start off in a way that's familiar to anyone who's been to a few magic shows and they are presented in such a laid-back, modest style that it's all the more amazing when each one takes the magic to a level high above the versions we have seen in the past.

Richard (left) and Darren Hoskins from Soft Cabaret perform comedy magic

At the end, we chatted to Jay Fortune and his partner Jen Allen. Jen did a very brief spot on stage between Richard's shows, creating an impressive portrait of Marilyn Monroe in three minutes flat (speed painting is one of her many talents). Poor Jay, however, had been supposed to put on his show the day before, then that afternoon, then they were hoping it might work out for the Monday... I'm hoping to catch Magick and Mayhem at the Barons Court Theatre in November (see http://www.falseimpressions.co.uk/).

For Iain and me, it was a very enjoyable, if slightly chaotic, day. For the performers, it must have been somewhat dispiriting making that much effort for a handful of pretty unresponsive punters - but then, as we all know, the show must go on.