OVER five decades, legendary magicians Penn & Teller have been sawing the magic rulebook in half.

Their shows combine bamboozling illusions with dark comedy, their magic often seems to go horribly wrong, and they have become notorious for repeatedly revealing to the audience exactly how their tricks are done - which has long prevented them from being members of the Magic Circle.

Not that they mind. In fact, they revel in the illusion of chaos. One of their stage shows began with a giant fridge falling on the pair, apparently crushing them.

So when they announced in 2019 that they were teaming up with Mischief, the British team behind theatre hit The Play That Goes Wrong, and the BBC1 comedy The Goes Wrong Show, it seemed a perfect match. The result was Magic Goes Wrong, which opened in the West End to rave reviews.

In Penn & Teller’s live shows, Penn Jillette takes the role of the chatterbox, while Teller remains silent. Many of their illusions involve comic danger, gore and violence. In one trick they aim guns at each others’ faces, fire and catch the bullets in their teeth.

A few years ago they were performing in London, and Penn’s family decided they wanted to see a show in the West End. “I don’t go to comedy theatre at all,” he says. “I like theatre to be deadly dull, slow and depressing. But my wife and children picked The Play That Goes Wrong. I realised not only was my family laughing harder than I’ve ever seen them, but I was too.” He told Teller to book a ticket, and it was he who started discussions with Jonathan Sayer, Henry Shields and Henry Lewis, the artistic directors of Mischief.

“Penn told me there’s a moment where a person reappears in a grandfather clock, and it’s going to fool you,” says Teller. “And he was right, it absolutely fooled me. So I said to the Mischief guys: ‘You do stuff that is so much like magic, we should do something together sometime’.”

A few months later, all five of them were eating homemade pancakes at Teller’s Las Vegas house and plotting a brand new show.

Working on a stage show with unfamiliar people was a new experience for Penn & Teller who, despite decades in the business, rarely collaborate with others.

“Teller and I have a dynamic that we’ve built over 46 years, so this was a huge leap of faith,” says Penn. “We were told: these guys are going to be here at 10am on Wednesday and you’ll start writing your show. You won’t even know which one is Jonathan and which ones are Henry. But it took about 20 minutes before I felt like I was around my closest friends.”

Shields, Sayer and Lewis spent a week-and-a-half putting together the bones of the show in a side room off the stage of The Rio hotel, where Penn & Teller are the longest-running headline act in Vegas history. The duo taught the team magic - “they picked it up incredibly quickly” - and suggested tricks to include, while the Mischief lads improvised dialogue and story.

“There was one moment Henry (Lewis) and Jonathan said, ‘it could kind of go like this’,” recalls Penn. “And then the two of them did a five minute improvisation. Now, I have sat in a room with Lou Reed playing Sweet Jane four feet from me. I’ve talked to Richard Feynman about physics. I’ve spoken to Bob Dylan. But I said: ‘This is a moment I will bookmark for the rest of my life’. I felt like I was watching the Pythons at their peak, and I thought: ‘This is why I’m in showbiz: to be that near that level of talent and skill’.”

By adding the trademark Goes Wrong approach, all the tricks in the show had to work on two levels: there had to be the trick that goes wrong, and then the trick that really dazzles the audience. How did they devise these illusions?

Says Teller: “You get an idea, which is usually quite grand, then you find that it’s impossible, and you revise it over and over again until it works. There’s a trick in the show where one of the cast gets accidentally sawed in half by a buzzsaw. That was more than a year of work. Part of the trick involves blood, but if you just show the blood on stage it looks boring. So a big part of the buzzsaw trick for us was developing it in such a way that when the blood came, it would be sprayed up against a huge backdrop where you could truly enjoy the bright red colour.”

Penn & Teller don't appear in Magic Goes Wrong - it is performed by the Mischief team, and takes the form of a disastrous fundraising benefit.

It's more comically gory than Mischief’s previous work. “I’m afraid it might have something to do with us,” says Teller. “We think that gore is essentially funny. It’s really hard to pull off serious gore in the theatre because people tend to want to laugh. They know that it’s fake, but they see that it looks real. And that’s very much like a magic trick.”

That clash of instinct and intellect is what their work thrives on. Says Penn: “It’s like being on a rollercoaster: I’m safe, no I’m not, I’m safe, no I’m not. Those two parts of your body are fighting.”

Despite the fact that Mischief and Penn & Teller have built their careers on making it look like everything is going horrifically wrong, they insist that mishaps are incredibly rare in real life. “While we’re rehearsing we might get a minor cut or bruise,” Teller says. “But we don’t ever allow the possibility of something going seriously wrong because if we did, we wouldn’t have been working successfully for 46 years.”

They’re dismissive of ‘edgy’ magicians who put themselves in real physical danger - and lampoon them in the show with The Blade, who puts his limbs on the line for art’s sake. The paradox of their work, and of Magic Goes Wrong, is that it all has to be incredibly safe for it look so dangerous.

For Teller, there’s a deeper, more unexpected layer to the show: “What’s interesting is how well it reflects the culture of the magic world. It’s mostly populated by well-meaning, very nice amateurs. There is a great, heart-tugging beauty about that to me. The poignancy of the magic trick that isn’t quite achieved, and you’re slapped in the face by reality, I think that’s a beautiful thing. That’s what this show is about. It has all these laughs and wild, crazy moments, but when it lands at the end, it’s about the sweetness of friends who love magic.”

* Magic Goes Wrong is at the Alhambra from March 1-5. For tickets call (01274) 432000 or go to bradford-theatres.co.uk