UNREAL: A Festival of Magic and Performance takes over Battersea Arts Centre from 7-14 November, and its full programme is now out: ten shows, four of them UK premieres and four works in progress.
UNREAL: A Festival of Magic and Performance runs at Battersea Arts Centre from 7-14 November 2026. The festival has now published its complete schedule, with a date, a time and a price for every show.
Three artists who make magic themselves have put it together: Tom Cassani, Augusto Corrieri and Tim Bromage. Their line-up sets sleight of hand and illusion beside ventriloquism, circus, dance, clowning and puppetry, with performers based in the UK and across Europe. BAC first named the festival in July, in its autumn-winter season announcement.
The opening day, 7 November, has three shows. At 3pm, Jim Dahl gives the UK premiere of Magic: An Illustrated History, a sideways history of the magician as conjuror, storyteller and fraud, told through live singing, illusion and puppetry. It runs 50 minutes, is recommended for ages 16+, and plays again at 3pm on 14 November. At 5pm, Stina Fors (Sweden/Austria) brings the UK premiere of A Mouthful of Tongues, a 45-minute solo in which her voice becomes the choreography and a warped kind of ventriloquism lets several characters speak through one body (14+).
The day ends at 7pm with Black Magic and Iterations, a double bill by Luis Sartori do Vale, Kalle Nio and Tom Cassani (Finland/Brazil/UK). In Black Magic, two magicians perform as a pair while being kept physically apart; Iterations follows Cassani's fixation on the precision and skill of sleight of hand. The evening runs 1 hour 20 minutes, including a 20-minute interval.
Valentina Cortese (France) gives the UK premiere of Lento e Violento at 8pm on 10 and 11 November. The 50-minute piece is built like a puzzle out of repetition, interruption and sleight, borrowing from circus, dance, music and illusion (10+). On 12 November at 7.30pm, Shambles Ensemble shares Perpetuity, a work in progress that mixes clowning, physical and visual storytelling, performance art and illusion to ask what anyone would do with eternity. Its starting points include Dorian Gray, lockdown and pot plants (60 minutes, 14+).
13 November is the busiest day. At 4pm, Hsiang-Sheng Teng (Taiwan/UK) presents Liminal, a work in progress drawn from learning silk magic from a Japanese sensei. It lasts 40 minutes and is followed by a 20-minute conversation (12+). At 6pm, Cassani returns with Oraculum, a new solo work in progress that takes its cue from mind readers, diviners and magnetic public speakers to show how much of our thinking we unknowingly share (60 minutes).
At 8pm the same evening, Chloé Vivarès (France) opens the UK premiere of Escaping Oneself, which plays again at 7pm on 14 November. The 60-minute solo uses feats of memory, theatre and comedy to tell the story of a woman whose instinct to survive drives her deep into books (12+).
Fors is back on the final day, 14 November, at 5pm with Answer Me, Pythia, a work in progress that carries on her research into ventriloquism and its long lineage, back through the comedian and the witch to the oracle. It asks what becomes of a voice once the beliefs around it shift, with one performer and a dummy sharing a single voice (60 minutes, 16+). The festival closes at 9pm with This Is Not a Magic Show by Vincent Gambini, the stage name under which Corrieri performs magic. The 65-minute show uses close-up sleight of hand to take apart how magic works, its clichés, and how readily an audience agrees to be fooled (14+).
Six of the shows are relaxed performances: A Mouthful of Tongues, Black Magic and Iterations, Perpetuity, Liminal, Oraculum and Answer Me, Pythia.
Battersea Arts Centre's Artistic Director and CEO, Tarek Iskander, said: "The best theatre has always worked a bit like magic: it runs on mystery and misdirection, and never lets you look behind the curtain. UNREAL celebrates that kinship — where magic and contemporary performance meet, and your own sense of wonder does the rest."
The three curators said: "In our different ways, we are all invested in expanding and rethinking magic’s potential as a kind of theatre: what forms can magic take, beyond those it is always associated with? How can magic collide with other art forms, and produce strange hybrids and as-yet-unimagined possibilities?"
All performances are at Battersea Arts Centre, Lavender Hill, London SW11 5TN. Tickets are Pay What You Can, with a recommended price of £10 to £15 depending on the show, and are on sale now from the venue.
