Interview with Quentin Reynolds, April 2008

I first met Quentin Reynolds last November, when I went to his marvellous Psychic Game Show, which he was performing for the public in Fallowfield, south Manchester. The group I was with all agreed it was one of the best evenings’ entertainment we’d had in a long time. I was struck by how kind and gentle Quentin was – and how extraordinarily generous. At least half the audience took home a really worthwhile prize and I was lucky enough to receive a copy of Quentin’s fascinating book ‘Intuition, Your Secret Power’, after he’d done an amazing trick with it. I’m very much into self-discovery and psychology and I read this volume in two sittings.

As you might expect from what I’ve already said, Quentin’s magic is understated and extremely clever. To give you an example, he read my friend’s mind over the telephone. How impressive is that? However, the show is even more than the magic. There’s storytelling, there’s psychological reflection and there’s a lot of humour.

Quentin moved to Manchester a few years ago from Dublin. Accomplished in children’s magic, cabaret magic, mentalism and now close-up, Quentin performs at private parties, at corporate events and on stage everywhere from Las Vegas to Fallowfield.

Knowing he would have valuable advice for new magicians, I interviewed Quentin for We Love Magic at a café in Manchester one April morning.

Georgie: Thank you for being interviewed, Quentin. I know you’re busy and it’s very kind of you to fit this in. Please tell us a bit about how you got started in magic and what advice you’d give to people starting out now.

Quentin: Well, I’ve been a professional magician for over twenty-five years; I’ve never had a proper job. I started off when I was still at school, doing shows. I intended to become a schoolteacher but then I discovered from my careers advisor that I was earning more money in my spare time as a student, doing magic, than I would as a teacher.

I first saw magic when I was six – Albert LeBas, the top Irish magician at the time. Then I had the usual magic sets and I came across a magic shop in England that sold by mail order and, well, here I am.

For somebody starting off in magic, the question they need to ask themselves is what they want from magic.

Magicians can be divided into three sections. There are professional magicians, people who earn money from magic, whether it be full time or part time; there are amateur magicians, people who are keen to learn, who love magic, who work at their magic and develop new ideas and new tricks; and there are hobbyists, who just like to buy a few tricks to show their friends but maybe don’t have time to work at their performance.

If somebody’s thinking of going into magic, they should try to go in at the amateur level, doing magic for the love of it. Don’t just go to a magic shop and buy a few tricks and think you’re a magician because you’re not, you’re just somebody who owns a few tricks.

I think it’s nice to develop a performance piece of at least two or three tricks. It shouldn’t be difficult to do. When we started the Junior Magicians’ Club in Dublin, when I was the president of the magic society there, I urged all the young magicians to learn two or three tricks that could be done with a pack of cards or maybe a few coins, that would not be difficult to do, so if they didn’t do it for a few months they wouldn’t have to go and relearn it. And they’d always have a party piece that they could perform for the rest of their lives.

Georgie: So you think cards and coins are a good place to start?

Quentin: They’re a great place to start because they’re cheap and there’s a huge array of effects you can do with them.

Georgie: What about joining a magic society, is that a useful thing to do?

Quentin: Well, there are advantages and disadvantages. The greatest advantages are that you get to mix socially with other magicians and you get to see visiting lecturers, some of whom are extremely good.

One of the disadvantages is that many of the members of magic clubs are hobbyists who think they’re professional and they will come and give you advice but they’re not speaking from experience, they’re speaking from opinion. You have to be very careful you don’t pick up other people’s bad habits.

Another disadvantage is that a lot of these hobbyists are more interested in gathering secrets of how tricks are done, rather than performing them.

Georgie: Did you start with cards and coins?

Quentin: When I started, it never dawned on me to do close-up shows, in the way people do now. I tended to get people sitting around and I would stand up and they’d watch me doing a show. I did my first paid show at the age of 14, for the local Ladies’ Club’s Hallowe’en party. And then a couple of other people heard about that show and booked me for their Christmas parties and I thought, “Oh, there’s money in this”.

I’ve never done an act. An act would be maybe a 12-minute spot that you might do at a magic convention or a variety show. I’ve hardly ever done a show that lasted less than 40 minutes. I’m not very good at doing an act. I’m good at doing a show. It’s a different discipline.

But, funnily enough, recently I’ve started doing a lot of close-up magic professionally. Most of my shows in Ireland were children’s shows. I learnt Punch & Judy and ventriloquism as well… Since I moved to Manchester, a lot of close-up work has come my way and so I’ve really had to look at that seriously. It’s very different – but it’s still theatre, it still needs to have a beginning, a middle and an end. You still need to find hooks to engage the audience: you’re not just going off and doing tricks, you’re giving a performance. I’ve been doing that now for about a year and I still don’t feel I’ve fully got the structure right. I’m nearly there and I’m constantly working on that.

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