Fake and Heist: From Art History to Award-Winning Shows
I've been writing and developing shows with magician and storyteller Chris Cook since 2014. Over that time, we've created work that sits somewhere between magic, theatre, comedy and storytelling, often starting with a subject that fascinates us and then working out how to turn it into something that could only really exist as a live performance.
In 2026, we brought two shows to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe: Fake and Heist: How to Steal a Masterpiece. Both are storytelling magic shows. Both explore art, crime, deception and theft. Both began with a fairly simple idea and became something considerably more interesting through the process of writing and creative development.
What interests me about the two shows is not simply that they were well received. It's the journey they took to get there. In both cases, we had to question our original idea, work out what the show was actually about, and find a form that allowed the subject matter to come alive on stage.
Fake
Chris and I first wrote a version of Fake in 2016. It was, to put it politely, a bit of a hot mess.
Like Fake, White Lies centred on Han van Meegeren, the Dutch artist and notorious art forger who became famous for fooling the art world with his fake Vermeers. But it also included stories about the Cottingley Fairies, a Tudor juggler, Sherlock Holmes and various other examples of fakery. We had lots of material we liked, but not much sense of what the show itself was trying to say.
“It could stand as an entirely magicless show.”
We were also trying to do something quite specific with the magic. We wanted to show the audience behind the tricks and reveal how the deception worked. It was an interesting idea, but in practice it meant that the magic began to dictate the storytelling. We'd have a trick we wanted to perform and then work backwards to find a story that allowed us to use it.
“Fascinating insight to the art world.”
For the 2025 Fringe, we decided to start again. We wanted to tell the Han van Meegeren story properly, but more importantly, we wanted to zoom out from the story itself and ask a much more fundamental question: why are we the people telling this story?
That changed everything.
“Fake is not just a magic show; it’s a history lesson, a philosophical debate, and a masterclass in storytelling.”
The obvious connection was magic. Magic is, after all, an art form built around fakery. A magician presents something to an audience that both performer and audience know isn't real. The audience knows there is a method. The magician knows there is a method. The pleasure comes from the gap between knowing something is false and wanting to believe it anyway.
That became the lens through which we told the story of van Meegeren. But there was another question underneath it:
Is magic art?
“A thoroughly prepared recipe mixed with a hint of deception.”
It's something Chris and I have grappled with throughout our work together. There can be a perception that magic is somehow less serious than other art forms. It can be seen as gimmicky or commercial, something that is entertaining and popular but perhaps less likely to be considered alongside theatre, dance or visual art. We'd certainly had enough unsuccessful Arts Council applications by this point to be familiar with that anxiety. So we made a conscious decision not to let the magic define the story. The story came first. The magic had to rhyme with it.
We also took inspiration from Orson Welles' F for Fake. The film had been at the back of our minds while we were writing White Lies, but eventually we decided to lean into the connection. We adopted elements of its structure and took inspiration from several key moments. It wasn't an attempt to copy the film. It was a deliberate homage. And, in its own way, that felt entirely appropriate. What would a show about fakery be without a little fakery of its own?
“Clever, naughty and inviting.”
The result was Fake. The magic was still fundamental to the experience, but it no longer existed simply because we wanted to perform some impressive tricks. It became part of the argument of the show.
At the 2026 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Fake performed at Gilded Balloon and sold out all 15 performances. It became the best-reviewed magic show at the Fringe, winning a Gold Edinburgh Festival Fringe Theatre Award. It also went on to Prague Fringe, where it won the Creative Award and Inspiration Award for its exceptional creativity and writing.
After almost a decade of developing the idea, we'd finally worked out what Fake was.
Heist: How to Steal a Masterpiece
So how do you follow that? How do you make another storytelling magic show about art crime without simply making Fake again?
I'd wanted to make a heist show since 2023, when I saw Werewolf at Summerhall. What particularly interested me was the way the audience could become part of the story. I wanted to create something where audience interaction wasn't an optional extra, but something built into the narrative itself.
The original plan was simple. The audience would enter as accomplices. We'd assemble a team. We'd plan a heist. Then we'd carry it out together. Like all good heists, the plan didn't quite go to plan.
We couldn't make the immersive element work in the way we'd originally imagined. That could easily have become a problem, because we'd started with a very clear concept of what the show was supposed to be. Instead, it became an opportunity to ask a more useful question: what were we actually trying to achieve?
We also knew that Heist needed to feel distinct from Fake. Fake was very theatrical and polished, with a strong central story and a particular visual and performance language. We wanted audiences to be able to see both shows and feel that they had experienced two genuinely different pieces of work.
Rather than telling one big story, we started looking at several heists throughout history. Very quickly, another question emerged: what is the value of art? Why would somebody steal a painting?
The obvious answer is money. But the more we explored the subject, the less satisfying that became. People steal art for all sorts of reasons: money, power, recognition, obsession, revenge, politics or simply because they want to possess something that they cannot otherwise have. Once we unlocked that question, the show started to tell us what it was really about.
What began as an immersive theatre piece with Chris playing a character became something much more personal. The heists became a way of exploring why we treasure the things that we do and why certain objects can have enormous value beyond their monetary worth. Again, the form followed the story.
The result was Heist: How to Steal a Masterpiece, a show full of comedy, storytelling and misdirection about audacious cons and daring thefts, but with something more personal underneath it.
“Effortlessly creating the structure not only of a successful heist, but of a well developed and engrossing magic show.”
“It builds to a dramatic conclusion, where the heist is completed in absolutely spectacular fashion. This isn’t one to be missed.”
“★★★★★
Williamson’s role is more than simply keeping the show on the road. He and Cook have developed Heist as a genuine theatrical piece, working out how the audience, sound, atmosphere and timing all contribute to the deception. The result is a show that feels deliberately fluid and unpredictable.”
Heist went on to win a Gold Award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Theatre Awards, alongside the critical recognition it received throughout the Fringe. The show had started as an idea about audience participation and ended up somewhere quite different, but ultimately much more interesting.
That, for me, is the point of creative development.
Conclusions
Looking back at Fake and Heist, what interests me most is how far both shows travelled from their original ideas.
The first version of Fake was a collection of interesting stories and tricks. It took years of development to realise that the real subject was fakery itself, and that the fact a magician telling the story wasn't incidental. It was the reason the story mattered.
Heist began with an immersive concept. The audience were going to become accomplices in a theatrical robbery. When we couldn't make that mechanism work, we had to step back and work out what was actually interesting about the idea. That led us towards questions about the value of art and why we become attached to the things we treasure.
In both cases, the creative development process wasn't about adding more and more ideas. It was about finding the idea underneath the idea.
That's something I've taken into the wider work I do with artists. I've spent more than a decade writing, directing and producing theatre, often helping other people take an idea from an early concept through to a finished show. I'm interested in the questions that help a project become clearer: why this story? Why this form? Why are you the person to tell it? What does the audience need? What can theatre do with this material that another art form can't?
Sometimes that means writing or rewriting. Sometimes it means dramaturgy. Sometimes it means finding a stronger theatrical proposition. Sometimes it means having an outside eye who can see something that the people inside the project can no longer see.
The important thing is not to become too attached to the first version of the show. A good idea is only the beginning. The work is discovering what it actually wants to become.
If you're developing a new theatre project and want help interrogating the idea, developing the writing, finding the structure or working out how the form can serve the story, I'd love to hear about it.
