David Blane and Keith Barry are the celebrity names, but our more usual encounters with magicians are at kids’ birthday parties, or maybe the odd corporate event. Lately though, magic has been making its way into the mainstream.
Pubs from The Liberty in Cork City to Cronins in Crosshaven have been booking magicians. They wander through bars, often table to table, entertaining punters on the way with everything from card tricks to disappearing coins. Initial scepticism gives way to wonder as they ply their trade.
Zac Coveney is part of this growing number of magicians. He’s even a member of Cork’s very own “Magic Circle”.
“We currently have 15 members — it’s a small but mighty group,” says Coveney.
“Our members are from various parts of Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain, and Malta. We typically meet once a month in the city centre to share ideas, workshop new material, and support each other’s performances.
“The group ranges in age from early 20s to late 60s, and everyone brings a different style and background — from sleight-of-hand and mentalism to close up magic and storytelling-based magic. It’s a really supportive, collaborative space, and I think that sense of community has helped Cork quietly become a small but exciting hub for magic in Ireland.”
They are also planning a new performance, called The Secret Show, running on the second Wednesday of each month in a secret city centre venue.
Framed as a live, ensemble-style magic night that features different members of the circle doing 20–30 minute sets, it’s effectively a stand up comedy night for magicians.
“We’ve sold out three shows this summer and have more in the works,” says Coveney.
Originally from Gurranabraher and still based in Cork City, Coveney’s entry into the world of magic owed less to primetime Paul Daniels and more to the cutting edge optics of David Blaine and the street magic of Dynamo.
“When I was 11 or 12, I saw David Blaine on TV and at the time I had a massive interest in science and that sort of stuff and I loved knowing how things worked,” he says.
“And this was something I couldn’t explain — he would put a needle through his arm, it wasn’t basic card tricks. It was intriguing, so I had to know how he did it, I had to figure it out.”
There was another influence closer to home who also helped him to hone his craft.
“Keith Barry is a good friend of mine, he is one of the first people I met when I was 11 or 12 years old.
“I got invited to his show when I was performing at a show myself, I had never seen a proper magician before [in person] and coincidentally he was on in Cork. I had a few card tricks and he walks out and seemingly he knew everything about everyone in the room. I was terrified because I thought ‘he knows everything about me’.”
To be fair, Coveney wouldn’t be the first person to be similarly unnerved by the omniscient Waterfordman. Since then, Barry has been “a very valuable mentor” as Coveney has continued his magic journey, meaning he feels he is now “a jack of all trades”.
“I do some guerrilla-style magic, not anything seriously dangerous, but I have done kind of bigger things,” he says. “Right now I am trying to develop something that is different and unique to me — I have developed a show called the Wonderist.”
Keith Barry isn’t Coveney’s only celebrity connection. He’s already unlocked the phone of a director of a cybersecurity firm and read the mind of Taoiseach Micheál Martin. So it’s mildly surprising to learn that Zac Coveney doesn’t actually own a magic wand.
Well, “not currently”, he says, but the 22-year-old magician sounds like a true believer in the otherworldly when he outlines just why he has pursued his passion since the age of 11.
“The way I approach it is I genuinely believe in magic,” the Cork man explains. “There are things around us that we genuinely can’t explain, you think of someone and then there they are — it could be coincidence or timing, it could be something else.”
Coveney sees himself as a performer and, despite some wobbles in the past, a true believer.
“It is an art, it’s something to be studied and learned and perfected, but it’s to bring that sense of wonder and the inexplicable happenings to people, because unfortunately it’s not something we experience too often in the modern world,” he says. “It’s a fast-paced, cynical world we are living in, you have to block out negative news online, and I find that people don’t believe in magic any more.
“I went on this journey a few years ago, at the end of covid, when I lost my belief in magic altogether.
“I wasn’t performing, I became very disillusioned by it and very cynical. I was working and one day I quit, I bought a one-way ticket to Paris and backpacked around Europe. I met every magician I could, from buskers to underground legends, I went on this massive journey to rediscover my magic.”
Coveney will be performing secret shows over the summer and also has an event at Kino Events House in Cork in August, but he will also be attending the Spanish School of Magic this summer. He describes it as the next phase of his development.
“Everywhere you go, there are so many different styles of magic and ways of performing it,” he says.
“It is very psychology-based in the Spanish school. I went to world’s largest magic convention in Blackpool in the UK in February, I met the Spanish guys there, they were doing four coins, through the table, as clean as a whistle, they knocked on the table, there was no crossover, no funny moves and it was beautiful to watch — stuff that looks like it could be genuinely happening.
“Definitely there is a very psychological link between magic in any form,” he continues. “Magic is the intersection of a lot of things: science, psychology, acting, performance, hypnosis, it’s all very much linked into your brain.”
Part of the thrill for Coveney is having an impact on the different types of people he encounters when he performs.
“I enjoy that challenge,” he says, describing adults as being “in three camps: the people who are total believers and want to be amazed, they’re my favourite people; at the other end of the scale you get the sceptics, ‘can I catch him out, is it a trick or is it real?’; then in the middle are the people who are on the fence, ‘I believe in some of it but I don’t believe some of it’.”
He plans on returning to London for more shows and having played Edinburgh last year, he wants to make it back to the Scottish capital, describing it as “a big one for me”, adding: “it’s organised chaos in the most beautiful way”.
His new show, he hopes, might stir the senses of his audience similar to his own voyage of rediscovery in recent years.
“Losing the sense of magic and then going on this journey to find it again,” he says. “Whether you want to believe afterwards is up to you.”
- Find The Secret Show dates on Instagram at @secretshowmagic, zaccoveney.com.
