EDINBURGH 2026: Review: BEN HART: LABYRINTH, Palais du Variété, Assembly George Square Gardens

Ben Hart has an exceptional understanding of the world of magic. More importantly, he understands that magic is not simply about fooling an audience. It is about creating an atmosphere, embracing mystery and inquisitiveness and inspiring genuine wonder.

Labyrinth may work even better in a smaller setting, but it remains extraordinary in the intimate in the round environment of the Palais du Variété. Hart points out that he is performing inside a tent surrounded by mirrors, meaning there is literally nowhere to hide. It is a delicious challenge for a magician who engages in misdirection.

Hart promises to take the audience on a journey of small choices, explaining how those seemingly insignificant decisions made over the course of a life create a map, form a picture and ultimately lead the way. It is an evocative premise which allows the magic to become something much more than a succession of tricks.

The exceptional nature of Hart is that he possesses such varied skills. He is an extraordinarily accomplished magician, but he is also exceptionally darkly funny. His comedy arrives naturally throughout the performance, including a brilliant moment when an audience participant struggles to follow his instructions. When the trick somehow succeeds, Hart admits that he amazes himself before cheekily asking the participant not to outshine him.

He begins with a one handed knot trick, demonstrating immediately that this is a show which is interested in the spaces between certainty and doubt. Hart suggests that art lives in the grey areas, and Labyrinth repeatedly explores precisely that space.

His card tricks have a wonderful sense of nostalgia, while catching a card on a sword introduces genuine drama and excitement. Yet the real wonder comes in the way Hart constructs the atmosphere around each illusion. He understands that the audience does not necessarily need to know how something works. In fact, he tells us mystery can be far more powerful than knowledge.

One of the show’s central ideas is that somewhere between losing and finding is where art lives. Hart is so skilled at creating an atmosphere that the audience willingly suspends its disbelief. He encourages them to embrace superstition, to embrace magic and, perhaps most importantly, to be persuadable.

The story of a girl who gives a boy a sword and a spool of thread to help him find his way out of a maze provides the show with its mythology. Every thought, Hart suggests, drags a thread through the darkness of the mind. It is a beautiful metaphor for a performance which continually returns to the connections between thoughts, choices, people, mistakes and memories.

A volunteer helps with a book trick, while a special house key trick is both astounding and truly wild. Hart follows this with needles and black silk image, before producing an eerie yet beautiful animal shadow projection. It demonstrates how readily the mind accepts visual images and instinctively attempts to make sense of them.

The use of a camera to show close up work is incredibly helpful and impressive, allowing the audience to witness the smallest details while never diminishing the theatricality of the illusion. Hart’s tricks continue to unfold with another impressive sequence involving chairs, but the show repeatedly returns to the idea of mistakes and the choices which were not made.

He tells us we pass through the stars, the creation of dust, our lives, varied people, choices and mistakes.

Hart clearly loves misdirection, but audiences can be assured that nothing he does is a mistake. Everything is carefully planned and utterly mesmerising. What makes him so compelling is his ability to make the impossible feel strangely intimate.

There is an exceptional class to Hart’s work. He possesses a special quality of nostalgia and showmanship which makes The Labyrinth feel like much more than a magic show. It is a theatrical experience built around mystery, memory and the human desire to find patterns in the world around us.

For all its cleverness, it never loses its sense of wonder.

And that is where Ben Hart is at his most magical.

Ben Hart, Labyrinth runs at Assembly George Square Gardens, Palais du Variété until 30August (except 17) at 6:20PM.

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