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.

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. Read more…   http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/jul/20/katherine-mills-magician-women-magic