Mischief Theatre's latest hit show Magic Goes Wrong comes to York Theatre Royal

The tale begins in 2008 when a group of graduates from LAMDA decide to create a show and head to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, just as thousands have done before them. They create a company to take their show, Mischief.

Within seven years The Play That Goes Wrong is in the West End where it won an Olivier for Best New Comedy and a What’s On Stage Award for Best New Comedy.

In the next seven years, bringing us up to date, Mischief, the company behind The Play That Goes Wrong have: played the Royal Variety Show, performed a radio version of their show on Radio 2 on Christmas Day, opened on Broadway, performed A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong on BBC1 on Christmas Day, had two television series based on the original format and – well, it would take the rest of this article to comprehensively list all the accolades.

Such simple and blindingly obvious ideas have turned Mischief into a literal industry within the theatre industry.

In 2019 Mischief added another brand to its expanding portfolio which, by that time, included Peter Pan Goes Wrong, The Comedy About a Bank Robbery, Groan Ups and a number of other shows.

The new show was Magic Goes Wrong and at the time was arguably the Mischief crew’s most ambitious piece.

It was created with two people who sowed the seeds for the success the shows Mischief have enjoyed with their own work – the magicians Penn and Teller.

Over five decades the duo have been sawing the magic rulebook in half, revealing the way they perform ‘magic’, in breach of the ‘magician’s code’, to theatre and TV audiences around the world. With a dark, comedic edge to their performances, Penn and Teller were the perfect collaborators for the Mischief theatre troupe.

Penn Jillette and Teller, who like Prince and Madonna before him goes by the single moniker, were performing in London a few years ago and Penn took his family to a West End show.

“I don’t go to comedy theatre at all. I like theatre to be deadly dull, slow and depressing. But my wife and children picked The Play That Goes Wrong. I realised that not only was my family laughing harder than I’ve ever seen them, but I was too.”

He immediately told Teller to book a ticket. Despite being known for his onstage silence, it was Teller who started discussions with Jonathan Sayer, Henry Shields and Henry Lewis, the artistic directors of Mischief.

Penn says: “I am more shy than Teller so it never crossed my mind to go backstage, but Teller took himself backstage and said, ‘hey I’m a star!’”

Teller insists it wasn’t quite like that: “As I was sitting in my seat, someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘you’re Teller aren’t you? The cast wants to give you free ice cream.’ So afterwards I went backstage to thank the cast and compliment them, because it really was one of the finest shows I’ve ever seen.”

Penn had warned Teller to watch out for a magic trick in the show, where a person reappears a grandfather clock, a trick which Penn insisted would fool Teller.

“And he was right, it absolutely fooled me. So I said to the Mischief guys, ‘You do stuff that is so much like magic, we should do something together sometime’.”

A few months later, all five of them were eating homemade pancakes at Teller’s Las Vegas house and plotting a brand new show.

Working on a stage show with unfamiliar people was a new experience for Penn and Teller who, despite decades in show business, rarely collaborate beyond the two of them. Teller

has directed two Shakespeare plays, as well as a documentary film, but for Penn it was nerve wracking.

“Teller and I have a dynamic that we’ve built over 46 years, so this was a huge leap of faith. We couldn’t go out to dinner with these guys, we had to jump straight into bed. We were told: they are going to be here at 10am on Wednesday and you’ll start writing your show. But it took about 20 minutes before I felt

like I was around my closest friends.”

Shields, Sayer and Lewis spent a week and a half putting together the bones of the show in a small side room off the stage of The Rio hotel, where Penn and Teller are the longest-running headline act in Vegas history. They taught the team magic – “they picked it up incredibly quickly” – and suggested tricks to include, while the Mischief makers improvised dialogue and story.

After a few more sessions, the show had come together. But, by adding the trademark ‘Goes Wrong’ approach, all the tricks in the show had to work on two levels: there had to be the trick that goes wrong, and then the trick that actually dazzles the audience. So how did they devise these illusions?

Teller says: “You get an idea, which is usually quite grand, then you find that it’s impossible, and you revise it over and over again until it works. There’s a trick in the show where one of the cast members gets accidentally sawed in half by a buzzsaw. That was more than a year of work.

“Part of the trick involves blood, but if you just show the blood on stage it looks boring, it has no impact at all.

“So a big part of the buzzsaw trick for us was developing it in such a way that when the blood came, it would be sprayed up against a huge backdrop where you could truly enjoy the bright red colour.”

Magic Goes Wrong is at York Theatre Royal, April 26 to May 1. Tickets available from the box office on 01904 623568 or via yorktheatreroyal.co.uk