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Frederick Bancroft, Prince of Magic 2 Buy this Giclee Print at AllPosters.com

Magic had long been a fairground and street amusement before it entered the theater in the mid-18th century. Many magic acts posed as scientific demonstrations, or centred on ingenious automata that played chess and performed lightning calculations. Much spectacular theatre was predicated on technical magic, the instantaneous transformations of scenery and the tricks of the harlequinade.

With the peace that followed Napoleon's defeat, solo conjurors criss-crossed Europe, among them the great cup-and-ball artist Bartolomeo Bosco (1793-1863), Ludwig Leopold Döbler (1801-64) who caught a chosen card from a flung pack on the tip of a sword, and J. H. Anderson, 'the Great Wizard of the North'. But it was Robert-Houdin and Wiljalba Frikell (1816-1903) who first worked on a stage denuded of apparatus and supernatural frills, lending their acts the respectable charm of a drawing-room entertainment.

A fresh impetus was given by the spiritualist movement that gained popularity in the 1860s. Mediums like the Davenport brothers (Ira Erastus, 1838-1911, and William Henry Harrison, 1841-77) claimed to effect miraculous escapes from knots and locked cabinets with the aid of ectoplasmic assistants; in turn, debunkers like J. N. Maskelyne made an evening of demonstrating how such tricks could be accomplished naturally.

The rise of variety required conjurors to dazzle an audience in 20 minutes. Innovations such as mentalism or mind-reading (invented by the Chicago newspaperman John Randall Brown and later performed over the radio by Joseph Dunniger) arose, and there were vogues for Chinese or Hindu conjurors - commonly Europeans in masquerade, such as the Great Lafayette (Sigmund Neuberger, 1871-1911) and William Ellsworth Robinson known as Chung Ling Soo (1861-1918), who was killed in his own catch-the-bullet act.

The palatial fin de siècle music-halls and variety theatres encouraged flashy and gigantic illusions, vanishing acts and mid-air transformations, as devised by e.g. Buatier de Kolta, David Devant, Kellar, Thurston and Horace Goldin. Typically, Harry Houdini began as a card and coin manipulator before gaining fame as an 'escapologist', capable of keeping an audience in suspense for several minutes as it watched a static tank in which he was encased.

Cinematic trickery was introduced by the stage conjuror Georges Méliès, and, with the decline of live variety entertainments, the more lavish acts folded. Magicians continued to play wherever variety shows were offered, but in America conjurors often drifted into chautauquas (lecture meetings of an educational or religious nature), circuses and fairgrounds. Television provided a new arena for old techniques, and there was a stage resurgence of sorts in the 1970s.

Broadway, which had proved cool to Houdini in 1926, warmed to the musical The Magic Show (by Bob Randall and Stephen Schwartz, 1974) in which the Canadian Doug Henning (1947-) performed Houdini's water torture cell in blue jeans and T-shirt and made a tiger vanish. He and colleagues like David Copperfield have invigorated the magic act with 'show biz' glamour and cunning lighting techniques. Cabaret and casinos are now common venues for conjurors: the Las Vegas- style revue makes a congenial setting for the wild-beast illusions of Siegfried (Fischbacker) and Roy (Horn).

The fantastic aspects of the magical tradition have influenced much avant-garde theatre, particularly the surrealist obsession (see surrealism) with the insolite: Cocteau's Orphée (1926) is a knowing adaptation of illusionism to a poetical conceit. John Vaccaro's transvestite production The Magic Show of Dr Ma-Gico (by Kenneth Bernard, La MaMa, 1973) exploited the structure of the magic act for anarchic audience-bashing, a technique more subtly and amiably wielded by Jérôme Savary's Grand Magic Circus shows.