Writers: Peter Clifford and The Great Baldini
Director: John Nicholson
Co-created and performed by stage magicians Peter Clifford and The Great Baldini, Holmes and Watson, and The Curious Case of the Masked Magician mashes up broad comedy with a pastiche of a Conan Doyle story and a selection of classic illusions that might best be described as deriving from the ‘Golden Age of Magic’.
Seeing platform magic performed live at Wilton’s, the world’s oldest surviving grand music hall, has a certain site-specific charm, and the two magicians bring a robust joviality to the evening. But the 75-minute show itself, burdened with an unnecessary interval, struggles to fully satisfy, either as theatre or illusion.
It is 1906. Holmes (Peter Clifford in traditional deerstalker, pipe, and magnifying-glass mode) is bored and looking for a new case, the criminal classes being “on holiday” yet again. Watson (The Great Baldini dials up the doctor’s bullish naïveté) suggests investigating the strange disappearance during a live show of the enigmatic Masked Magician, a stage performer whose true identity is the most fiercely guarded secret in show business. Inspector Lestrade is flummoxed, so naturally Holmes takes the bait.
Plot shenanigans see the detecting duo identify four music-hall performer suspects, all conveniently located near stations on the newly opened Bakerloo Line, though quite what the locations have to do with the story never really emerges from the fog, even when rapidly explained with magnets and a flipchart in the closing moments.
First off is Madam Arcati, psychic to the nobility, played by a dragged-up Baldini. It is difficult to gauge the extent to which the show’s creators want us to see her as a parody stage medium. Having delivered a decent mentalism trick (answering an unseen question written by an audience member), she tries her hand at another. “Put your hands up if you’re a woman on a diet”. Is there ever an audience without a woman on a diet? Apparently not at Wilton’s, which rather confounds the trick, assuming the question is not meant as a joke, which it might be.
Next, we get the card shark, Diamond Jack, there “to bamboozle, amuse, and ensure that you lose”, a vehicle for some decent four-card sleight of hand. Clifford’s third suspect dons a Harlequin outfit and delivers a ukulele song about balloons, cue for some balloon tricks. The fourth suspect is Houdeenit, a character there to give Alex and Jack from the audience an opportunity to aid Baldini with some so-so escapology.
It is amiable enough stuff, leading up to a furiously complex conclusion to the Masked Magician’s fate that may well have you scratching your heads in befuddlement. Holmes here adds little to the magic, and the magic adds little to Holmes, leaving one wondering quite what the point of mashing them up is.
Reviewed on 26 May 2026
