Review: THE ENIGMATIST, Wilton's Music Hall

David Kwong loves words the way chefs love food: obsessively, indulgently and with a eagerness to serve ever more and more of their treasured discoveries. In The Enigmatist, his puzzle-box of a show, that affection becomes both the engine and the anchor. When Kwong’s in full flight, riffing on anagrams, cyphers and rotational symmetry with the intense zeal of a man who reads dictionaries for fun, he’s utterly charming. The trouble is that charm can only carry you so far when you’re also hauling two hours of theatrical luggage behind you.

By taking his collection of conundrums across the Atlantic for the first time since it debuted in 2019, veteran NYT crossword-setter, magician and word game fanatic hopes to challenge the country that birthed the world’s first cruciverbalist: the New York World published the first of what they initially called a “word-cross” in 1913 but it was Liverpudlian journalist Alan Wynne who devised them for the newspaper. Opening with a supremely smug phrase along the lines that “every trick has an explanation and every puzzle has a solution”, the American may as well have taken off a glove and gently smacked us all around the face with it. Game on. 

This production is something of a mental ménage-à-trois. Cleverly constructed riddles based around words, pictures and music punctuate Kwong’s excited history lesson on celebrated American codebreakers William and Elizebeth Friedman. Added into the mix are a series of magic tricks that range from the obvious and the derivative to the occasional head-scratcher. You don’t have to love all three of these elements to have a good time but those coming for only one may struggle.

Structurally the show dances between biographical anecdotes (auto and otherwise), audience involvement, and slow builds that pay off in elegant reveals. This could all easily buckle under its own cleverness but the complexity is treated as an invitation rather than a barrier. Even when the tech doesn’t quite deliver or an elastic band fails him, Kwong shrugs it off and finds a way forward. He treats any setback - like everything else - as a puzzle to be solved and, to his credit, every snag that pops up is one he solves with professional ease.

It is the puzzles themselves that are the most nakedly entertaining aspect here. Even before we’ve sat down, we have one in our hands; a tricky maze printed on two sides of a card is the first sign that — at least for the duration of The Enigmatist — our grey matter will really matter.

The best efforts require lateral thought and mental somersaults.  The worst ones? Let’s just say that those who have committed to memory the names of all fifty US states and their capitals and have more than a passing familiarity with the musical oeuvre of Christopher “Biggie Smalls” Wallace, twentieth-century White House residents and Eighties baseball icons will be in their element here. More than once, the deeply American flavour of the puzzle solutions suggest Kwong’s script could do with light rewriting if he plans to spread his wings on this side of the pond.

Unsurprisingly, given the highly erudite nature of this fast-talking Harvard graduate whose parents are both university professors, there’s an element of education along the way. Take, for example, his lesson on how to hammer your opponent at Scrabble. Which six letters should we gravitate towards? Is uwu really a playable word? Can qajaq be deployed with a straight face? How about the vowel-rich pair of inia and oribi? (S,A,T,I,N,E; yes; yes, and — you guessed it— yes). 

He builds an atmosphere where even the most puzzle-averse punter feels emboldened to take a swing at the posers he throws their way. Crucially he knows when to apply a little theatrical petrol to the engine. Word nerds, history fans and magic geeks are stereotypically introverted creatures but the American is an accomplished stage performer, able to get a set of notoriously difficult London theatregoers up on their feet and shouting out as if it was Friday night down at the bingo hall. 

There will come a day when a magician doesn’t invoke their first steps into the realm of conjuring. This isn’t that day. To go alongside the first rule of cabaret, there’s also a first rule of magic. To wit: at some point in the show, there will be a nauseatingly nostalgic and entirely indulgent episode on the performer’s infant entry into the industry. Out come the blurry family photos from the last millennium showing supportive parents and a wide-eyed child looking directly into the camera. Follow them with obligatory stories of magic sets under the Christmas tree and small hands learning their first ever card trick. (This is, it has to be said, unusual among the various vaudevillian art forms; drag, burlesque, musical comedy and circus never see the need to fold in the dollops of earnest sentimentality rarely seen outside West End musicals.) Kwong’s nod here is a thankfully short episode but this superfluous diversion still makes us feel the weight of this lengthy effort.

This lover of all things lexicological has no doubt heard of Nebraskan linguist Louise Pound who, around the same time Wynne was constructing what would become the very first "word-cross", came up with the nonsensical word “eellogofusciouhipoppokunurious” (a cousin of sorts to our supercalifragilisticexpialidocious). It means “very good” and The Enigmatist doesn’t quite deserve that description — at least not yet. It can't be beyond the ken of this clever American to craft a sharper, shorter version of what is currently a baggy production. As any crossword-setter worth their salt knows, though, refining a puzzle to both suit and entertain its intended audience is at least half the fun.

The Enigmatist continues at Wilton's Music Hall until 27 November