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Alexis Michalik’s ‘Le Cercle des Illusionnistes’ has been a thumping hit in Paris, where it premiered in 2014 and is still running in revived form. And its English-language premiere – in a translation by playwright of the moment Waleed Akhtar – kicks off London theatre’s 2023, with Hampstead Downstairs’s traditional first press night of the year. Directed by Tom Jackson Greaves, ‘The Art of Illusion’ concerns two strangers who meet in unusual circumstances in a Parisian cafe in 1984 and set out to explore an illusory world concealed beneath the city’s streets.