Luke

Luke Dickson is an actor and theatre maker.

27 years after losing his dad in an accident, he debuted his one-man show ‘The Great Dixoni’.

“It took me a long time to recognise that The Great Dixoni was about reflecting on the loss – it took me a long time to even admit it.

My dad was an amateur magician - he’d had one professional gig, but it’s all he wanted to do. His Dad wanted him to go into the tomato- growing business and back in those days you did what you were told. But he always kept the magic up.

I have his suitcase, it says ‘Great Dixoni’ on the back.

He died when I was three. I have very vivid memories of the time; it was very much ‘your life is going to change completely – here are your memories before and here are your memories after’.

I can remember seeing him stood next to the old 70s gas fire holding court with his various magic tricks. It’s like a snapshot in my head.

The idea came about years before I made it; I wanted to work magic into a show, I just thought it would be really cool to have a normal show that magic tricks just happened within. I showed my idea to a fellow theatre maker and he said, ‘I don’t understand Luke, the story’s alright but why don’t you just make the show about the magic tricks?’ 

I’m forever grateful to him because it was spot on – he spotted what I was refusing to.

I know it sounds cheesy as hell, but in some way it was a calling – one that I first wanted to outright deny - ‘no I am unaffected, it was years ago, I was three.’

Being able to consolidate all that material and just make some sense of it was a huge relief. It made me look back at my own childhood, growing up without him, what nature part he might have passed on to me by genetics and what I’ve missed out on in terms of nurture – it hit me like a wave.

During rehearsals I got a letter from my dad’s sister, totally out of the blue. She’d bumped into a famous historian who had put some really old cine footage of amateur dramatics clubs onto a DVD and it had my Dad on it.

I think the show really helped me acknowledge who I am – to go full circle in a sense.

I suppose symbolically, or semiotically, what I’m saying is I’m the one that took that on, I’m the extension of that now, he was Dixoni and now I am.

Now you see him, now you don’t.

Now you see him.”