Review | Magician Scott Silven’s The Journey is a trippy experience that draws in his socially distanced audience – perfect for the coronavirus era
- From a room in Scotland, Silven joins an audience of up to 30 people per performance, each in their own room – socially distanced but brought together digitally
- The audience, taken back and forth along the timeline of a story, share details that are woven into the myth he presents in the Hong Kong Arts Festival show
For a journey that doesn’t begin with even a single step, The Journey certainly takes you places.
Created by magician, illusionist and – it would seem – mind reader Scott Silven, it’s a trippy experience all right, and one that’s particularly lockdown literate.
Their images projected on three walls of Silven’s den, they are summoned to speak in turn, to offer a memory, a number, a sketch, a favourite colour, even to brandish an object of personal significance to feed into the narrative Silven develops as he establishes a connection (a word heard often in the show’s 50 minutes) with his remote observers.
It’s the 21st-century, electronic equivalent of asking a member of the audience to come up to the stage, participate in a trick and be made a mild fool of – only much more polite.
Each illusion and baffling suggestion of Silven’s second sight (“tricks” would be too small a word, and this isn’t chasing the ace of spades or sawing the lady in half) is woven into a myth he relates of a boy lost in the Scottish Highlands, a rugged region central to his own psyche.