There is a line in Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay that seems to sum up our centuries-old love affair with magic: “The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam,” he writes. “That what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash.”



Indeed, while entertainment trends have come and gone (ostrich racing, anyone?), our appetite to be astonished by illusions, alchemy and mind tricks is insatiable. Long before David Blaine was starving himself in a plastic box, the Egyptians and Romans were disappearing balls beneath cups – and Simon the Sorcerer cornered the market in levitation more than 2000 years before Dynamo came along.

Trailblazing magician Fay Presto Photograph: Associated/Rex Shutterstock

While it is an entertainment built on defying the impossible, however, magic has proved wholly inadequate at escaping one particularly archaic set of shackles. Go through any roll call of the magical greats, from Harry Houdini and the Great Lafayette to Penn & Teller and Derren Brown, and the lack of women is stark. They haven’t been totally absent – they consistently appear as scantily clad assistants, holding hoops of fire or being sawn in half as some sort of living prop – but they have rarely been the ones performing the illusion.

That’s not to say there aren’t exceptions. The transgender illusionist Fay Presto was one of the first female magicians admitted to the Magic Circle in 1991 when the society opened its doors to women. And this summer, among the lineup of Impossible, the biggest magic show to open in the West End for years, is Katherine Mills, whose psychological style of magic dabbles in everything from standard vanishing tricks to darker mind games.

Mills is still in the middle of preparing for the show when we meet in Bloomsbury on a rainy morning for a coffee and a quick magic lesson – on the strict condition I give away none of her secrets. I had been hoping our meeting would take place in the Magic Circle HQ, which has been located near London’s Euston Station for 110 years, but unfortunately, it turns out muggles can’t just wander in on a Monday morning.

“When I told people I was going to become a magician, most thought I was joking,” Mills says with a laugh. “Now, if I’m in the pub or a bar, people make me prove myself as a magician when I mention it’s my job because they just don’t believe me.”

It’s not hard to see why. Magic is an unusual profession at the best of times, but Mills is also charming. She is entirely lacking in the oddball characteristics of David Blaine or the slick trickster quality of Derren Brown. The one quality they all share, however, is a captivating self-confidence, and as I later learn the hard way, the key to a successful magic trick is almost always in the performance.

Photograph: Everett/Rex Shutterstock

The definitive narrative of most magicians seems to be that of the lonely, excluded child who discovers magic as a solace and route to popularity. Mills, however, found the element of awe attractive. As a teenager, she became obsessed with Blaine, recording his magic tricks on television and obsessively rewatching them to figure out how they were done. But the interest lay dormant until she left Loughborough University, where she had studied psychology and sociology, and found herself at an event where Dynamo was performing.

She describes it as like a lightbulb going on: “I thought instantly, ‘That’s what I want to do.’”

I ask her to elaborate. “Well, I’ve always been fascinated with human behaviour. I’m interested in the ways we interact with each nother, how our belief and faith can change our behaviour; what you can do if you can manipulate someone’s belief, and how you can control them – I find all that fascinating. And I realised magic was such a brilliant and beautiful medium to explore that.”

After convincing a friend to come with her to the International Magic convention, in London, which she describes as “a sea of men – genuinely not a woman in sight”, she met the magician Max Somerset. He would go on to become her mentor, guiding her initiation into the closed world of magic over the next two years.

Mills was greeted with curiosity rather than hostility by her fellow magicians, she says, especially during her early days in the Magic Circle, into which she was admitted in 2008. “I definitely felt odd being one of the only women at the beginning,” she says. “The older magicians were particularly intrigued to find out how good I was and what kind of magic I was doing, just because I was female. There is that extra element of proving yourself, more judging eyes on you.”

The figures also speak to the glaring inequality. Only around 100 of the Magic Circle’s 1,500 members in the UK are women, and there is only one female officer. Why does Mills think there is still such a gender imbalance both on TV and within the hallowed Circle itself? “For so many years, the Magic Circle was – and to some extent still is – a bit like an old boys’ club,” says Mills. “Some of that is down to the fact that women weren’t admitted until the early 90s. It feels like magic is playing catch-up to the rest of the entertainment industry, because for so long it was white gloves and top hats and scantily dressed female assistants, which is hardly encouraging for young girls.”

Mills pans the theory that magic appeals more to men than women because it’s inherently about a patriarchal desire for power and control, but does not dismiss the idea that other factors have contributed to the male domination of the upper echelons of magic. “It is fair to say magic is quite techy, so it has an appeal to certain men,” she says. “There is such dedication involved; the ability to persevere – repeat, repeat, repeat – can lend itself to the obsessive male personality.”

Magician Katherine Mills teaches Hannah Ellis-Petersen some new tricks. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

So can she make a magician out of me in the 15 minutes we have left together? Mills’s mind-games magic – from cracking the codes of jewellery shop safes to predicting the sex of babies at antenatal yoga classes – come from more than a decade of studying the “predictable” patterns of human behaviour. Instead, we go for the fail-safe option. The secrets behind the card trick she reveals to me are apparently “all method and require no skill at all”, which suits me just fine, but Mills still swears me to secrecy.

Later that night, at dinner with a friend, I whip out my shiny new pack of cards eager to demonstrate my newfound skills. We go through the motions of the trick: he picks out two cards and randomly puts them back into the pack. The idea is that I then throw the pack into the air and “magically” catch just his two cards.

As I’m chucking the pack to the ceiling, to the slight bemusement of the neighbouring table at this small Korean restaurant, I’m struck by the sense I may have forgotten something vital. I hold up the five of spades and the three of diamonds left in my hand, and my companion raises an eyebrow. “Those,” he says drily, “are not my cards.”

I am reminded of Mills’ parting words about the pressures of being a magician, male or female. “The problem with magic,” she says, “is that if it goes wrong, it’s total crap isn’t it?”