Theatre: The wonderful wizard of Essex

Paul Kieve has had a special effect on British drama - and now he is helping to revive the true magic of the theatre in Angela Carter Cinderella.

THERE IS a moment early on in the National's staging of Haroun and the Sea of Stories when Nabil Shaban, who plays the arch-fabulist, the Shah of Blah, reaches into his mouth and produces one brightly coloured ribbon after another. Of all the tricks that the illusionist Paul Kieve has brought to productions, this, the oldest in the book, is hardly the most stupendous. But it defines the quality that has directors pounding at his door: a seemingly endless supply of effects, each with the capacity to tell a story like nothing else on earth.

Only an endless supply will do right now. Kieve has been in constant demand ever since he bid farewell to his ocean-going magic double-act, The Zodiac Brothers, in 1991, and landed a job at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, helping Ken Hill turn HG Wells's The Invisible Man into a special- effects romp that beat a path straight to the West End. At 31, he is now unrivalled in a field of his own devising. This season, he's had a hand in the witchcraft in Into the Woods at the Donmar, assisted with a grisly dismemberment in Arabian Nights at the Young Vic and put body and soul into the keenly anticipated co-production between Improbable Theatre and Neil Bartlett, Angela Carter Cinderella, at the Lyric, Hammersmith.

The softly spoken member of the Inner Magic Circle won't be drawn on the means by which the spirit of Victorian panto will arise from the theatre's wings, beyond muttering about a neglected technique known as "the black art". ("Put it this way: it involves using very little light.")

This commitment to concealment is central to a benign theory about enchantment (you hesitate to call it a philosophy; he has an Essex-bred down-to-earthness that shudders at any gravitas.) "If you tell people that you're going to do something in a magical way, you have to carry that through," he says. "I remember being very disappointed as a child, being taken to see Peter Pan and seeing the wires."

The determination never to disappoint child or adult shines through in his slick, albeit lo-tech, work. His less trumpeted credits include transforming Simon Russell Beale into Dr Jekyll at the RSC; casting a hallucinogenic spell over the ENB hit Alice in Wonderland; making a magician of Bernard Cribbins for La Grande Magia at the RNT; and causing the head of the French body artist Orlan to stand disembodied on an ICA table.

It comes as no surprise to learn that "it's not been an easy journey" getting Angela Carter Cinderella up and running. Improbable Theatre's guiding stars - Julian Crouch, Phelim McDermott and Lee Simpson - have risen to prominence over the past three years with a series of shows that take pride in showing you how its done. "We've always used magic that's declared to the audience," explains Crouch, who met Kieve when the latter consulted his puppetry expertise while working on the stage version of Roald Dahl's The Witches. "This is the first time where people won't always know what's happening."

As always with Improbable, the risk of disaster is part of the thrill, but there are underlying affinities that should create a coherent whole, even as they complicate the audience's suspension of disbelief. There's an uncynical desire to provoke wonder, a wish to go back to theatre's roots and to revisit the time when stage magicians such as Georges Melies first flirted with the tricksy possibilities afforded by cinema, and a hunger to explore the darker side of myth and magic.

Kieve is flying off after tomorrow's opening night to LA, to start work on a multi-million-dollar Broadway show for Disney. Whether it goes horribly wrong or delightfully right, he looks certain to have a ball.

`Angela Carter Cinderella', now previewing, opens tomorrow at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, London (0181-741 2311)