Then there are others who start from the position that “magic is not real”, and will deride a stage magician for practising their craft without offering any explanation as to how the performance is being carried out. This is a more cowardly form of criticism, since we can all assume that an illusionist is using some form of sleight of hand. Just saying “that’s not real” is not particularly good criticism, since you are offering no alternative explanation.

This is an important distinction. If you were in the cinema watching a movie where, for example, a main character shot a fireball from his or her fingertips, you would not be well advised to stand up and tell the other people watching that “that’s not really happening – it’s just a film!”. Of course it is, but people go along to be impressed by the show.

Picking holes in a magician’s act without having any cold hard facts is a stupid thing to do. Most of the people in the audience have pretty much gathered that the illusionist is using some kind of trick to give the appearance of magic, but they enjoy the show because the tricks are well covered and look authentic. We can all be skeptical from a position of ignorance, but it is only really valid when we come from a position of knowledge.

It is completely permissible to lie through your teeth as part of a stage performance. It’s no different from what actors do, after all. You can pass around one of the props for your show and tell the audience “As you can see, there are no hidden compartments!”, as long as you know they won’t be able to detect that there really is at least one. After all, it’s illusion, you are already lying to them.

However, lies of omission can be a more enjoyable way of getting the audience to believe that you have done something out of the ordinary. “You can see here, there are four coins. Now look as I take one away – and voila, there are still four coins.”. OK, that sounds fairly limp, but the point is that what the audience can see is very different from what actually is. Perhaps there were actually five coins to start with and they could only see four.

Another trick that is occasionally used as part of stage magic is the use of a “shill”. This is someone, known to the magician, who poses as part of the audience and is invited on stage to “assist” with a trick. The magician may well ask the “shill” to confirm that they have never seen each other before, which they will do.

There are various ways to sell a magic trick. If, for example, you have just made a coin “disappear”, it is to be assumed that you know where it has gone. However, if you remain deadpan in this situation, the audience will not go on the journey of confusion you want them to. Both visual and verbal sells will help with this trick. Asking “where has it gone?” as though you are unsure, and making a show of looking for it, can really help.

Various other tricks involve something along the lines of borrowing an expensive watch from a member of the audience and then making it “disappear”. A good way to sell this trick is to pretend to botch the “reappear” part of the trick and to become very apologetic, asking the owner if the watch was very expensive, and promising to pay them for a replacement. As the trick seems to be over it will be all the more impressive when you then produce the watch during the next trick.

Shakespeare himself uses three witches to compelling effect in perhaps his most famous play, Macbeth, while including such characters elsewhere in his oeuvre. He himself was most likely not the first, as there is a certain fascination to the idea of magic which makes for very entertaining reading. Authors like Philip Pullman and Sir Terry Pratchett have also created fascinating magical worlds.

The upshot of this is, for some, a certain lack of enthusiasm for stage magic. If you have read a book in which magic is used to create new ways of traveling, as a weapon and in other extraordinary ways, as a child you would be forgiven for wondering why the magician in front of you is using it to make a marble disappear. Where’s the shock and awe in that?

Smart illusionists will take this as a challenge. Harry Potter may well be able to produce a corporeal Patronus, and that’s nice and all, but Penn and Teller can catch bullets between their teeth. Stage magic needs to keep improving to keep people interested, and the best illusionists will know what they need to do.

Magic entertains us. JK Rowling has done a particularly good job in making the whole idea accessible to a wider audience by creating a world where there are magical ways of doing just about everything that we do by hand in the non-magical world. It has been beguiling enough to make kids and adults alike feel a little bit cheated that they have not had the opportunity to attend Hogwarts.

One thing that has made the Harry Potter books popular with adults is the darker nature of the later books. Harry grows from a young wizard with no more skill or knowledge than most to being the boy who saves the world, and if that sounds hokey then it is worth reading the books to see how cleverly and how starkly the challenges are conveyed.

We have come a long way since the early characterisations of witches and wizards on TV and in books and movies, where characters were either evil old crones or cheerful and witty. In a world where everyone is magical, the spells are real and magic itself is no advantage, and this is what gives the books their depth.

This much is not news to anyone, but what is interesting is how the word “magic” has come to be used so regularly for things that are impressive. The idea of magic as a phenomenon is that it makes things happen when there is no realistic explanation for it. There is of course a difference between being very good at something and being freakishly good at it.

Any parent in the world has probably, at one time or another, explained how something works by saying it is “magic”, usually to avoid giving a longer, more detailed and practically incomprehensible to children, explanation. It usually satisfies the child if they are young enough, as children are generally perfectly ready to believe that their parents are magical.

The actual existence of magic is something that will always divide people. Skeptics will have an explanation for a seemingly magical phenomenon or will believe that one exists where believers will happily put the phenomenon down to magic. As we cannot disprove the existence of real magic, it is quite pleasant to believe it exists. What is certain is that we will always be impressed by someone doing something inexplicable.

The old image of the magician wearing a cape and a hat has gone out of fashion in recent years, but there is still room for both in a show if your tricks will be helped by them. The cape is particularly useful for tricks which involve a revelation – “now you see it, now you don’t!” – while the hat can be used for tricks which involve “magically” producing something as if from thin air.

Other props which are commonly used in magic shows include playing cards. Some of the simplest magic tricks involve a deck of cards and the selection of one of those cards by an audience member. When the card is placed back in the deck, the magician will “find” the card using a trick that makes it identifiable. In the basic trick, he or she will pull it out of the deck. To go more advanced, the magician can make the card “appear” in the audience member’s pocket or inside another prop.

There are many and various tricks which require specific props. Unless you happen to be a very skilled illusionist it is wise to have some of these props on hand, as working without them can be hugely demanding.

The author Sir Terry Pratchett has created a certain number of characters who are witches, and who have special supernatural powers which they use only in extreme circumstances. Much of their “magic” comes from knowing when common sense will give them a better answer, and then performing the task required while using some mysterious wording to give the occasion more of a spin.

The thinking behind this, for both the author and the characters, is that people will be impressed by the things they do not recognise. A simple flick of the wrist might be enough to solve the problem, but the mystical words convince people that what has taken place is magical. The most obvious example of this is the “magic word”. A common or garden illusion might be fairly impressive, but making people think that the words were what caused it to work is showmanship.

In some ways, illusionist acts are about a magician knowing one thing that the audience do not, and exploiting that fact to make it look like they have special powers. Selling the trick is the most important thing.

This should not be taken as being a notice that to be a proper magician you need to wear a cape and a funny hat. In reality, this is not showmanship but just a fairly cheap way of making yourself look impressive. If you want to be a real showman – or show woman – it’s about making the tricks look easy and adding something to the show that makes people smile.

Many magicians combine their illusions with something approximating a stand-up show. You don’t need to be the funniest person in the world to make this fly, simply have a few jokes which enable your show to be something more than a guy on a stage with some tricks. You can improvise things like pretending you’ve forgotten the trick – a false finish which makes the crowd laugh and applaud when you reveal that you knew it all along and had given the finish some thought.

One part of showmanship which cannot be ignored is involving the crowd. Illusion is often unimpressive if you appear to be running through the motions. If you manage to keep up some repartee and even pick someone to be a sidekick, then you can make a big difference to how impressive your act is.

For instance, is “mind-reading” or any other “psychic” trick magic? Being able to tell what someone is thinking may be an act of incredible dexterity, but it may also be a matter of just noticing cues. Some excellent illusionists have managed to lift the veil regarding “mind reading” by showing how they have seemingly read a person’s unspoken thoughts merely by reading their eyes and other non-verbal “tells”.

Looking at it in a more prosaic way, think about how the best poker players seem to win more often than not in a game which is, to all intents and purposes, one of luck. Assuming that you are playing with a clean deck and the same conditions all exist for every player, how does the same guy win so often? By knowing (or having a very strong reason to think) that another player will do something they have not said they will do.

You can call it magic, or illusion, or cold reading, but for the sake of judging how impressive something is, all that matters is that the person doing it can do something that other people could not.