Inside a café, surrounded by unsuspecting customers, you are invited to sit at a table and watch a 15-minute performance. In front of your very eyes, playing cards transform inexplicably and sugar cubes vanish without a trace. But as you listen to the performer’s voice and the sounds of the café on headphones, the line between reality and fiction becomes increasingly thin: is this a real café, or a film set filled with actors?

Combining expert sleight-of-hand magic with the dreamlike nature of cinema, Close-up invites you to briefly reimagine everyday life as an uncanny illusion.

Supported by Farnham Maltings’ New Popular, Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, the University of Sussex, and Arts Council England.

‘So audacious, so absurdly, giddily inexplicable, not just a trick but actual impossible magic…. I’m literally in tears of joy.’ – Exeunt Magazine