Illusionist finds his great escape

IT'S no exaggeration to say magic changed Paul Cosentino's life. As a young child, he was shy, not very popular and educationally a slow developer. "I didn't read my first word until I was in grade three," says the magician/escape artist/illusionist and runner-up in this year's Aus-tralia's Got Talent. "I cannot explain how terrible it was to be asked to read out loud. It was shocking. It really crushes you."

His mother, a school principal, took him to all kinds of experts, but nothing helped until, aged 12, he learnt his first coin trick. Suddenly, he wanted to know more.

There was a book in the house, an encyclopaedia of magic, but Cosentino wasn't quite up to reading it, even at 12, so his mother read it to him and as he became more and more entranced by the world of possibility it opened up, he realised he was going to have to start reading himself. "And from being this kid who couldn't speak or talk, I became by 16 somebody who was standing in front of people performing, and it was all because of magic," he says.

The bookshelves in Cosentino's workshop in a wing of his parents' house in Lysterfield are crammed with tomes on magic, illusions and escape artistry, as well as DVDs and videos, all of which he's devoured over the years. There are signed posters and photos on the walls from the likes of Penn and Teller, David Blaine and David Copperfield, all of whom he has met (mostly in Las Vegas). "When I first met them they were my heroes," he says. "It's weird to think there are kids now who might look at me in the same way."

If there are, he readily acknowledges it's all down to the Channel Seven talent show. He didn't win, but an estimated 4 million people (including regional and time-shifted audiences) saw his high-energy mix of Michael Jackson-style dance moves and magic.

"It's made a huge difference," says the 28-year-old on the eve of his first Melbourne theatre show, at the Athenaeum. "I'm not doing anything different to what I've been doing for the last 10 years, but suddenly people know I exist."

Grateful as he is for the exposure, he bemoans the fact that there's no infrastructure he can tap into to take his act to the next level. In fact, the only support network is the one he and his family have made. One brother, Adam, is his manager, another brother, John, is his trainer, and his father, a structural engineer, helps design the elaborate props, including the rig from which a heavily manacled Cosentino was dropped into five metres of water at the Melbourne Aquarium last February.

That stunt — in which he spent three minutes and 39 seconds under water — was a year in the planning, cost $25,000 of Cosentino's money and brought not a cent of direct income. "It was all about raising my profile," he says.

It did, however, bring him plenty of offers to repeat the stunt. He declined them all. "Just the natural high — you haven't had air for four minutes, then all this air goes rushing in — it's just exhilarating. I can never recapture that moment now. It's a one-off. For me it's lost its interest. You're not going to get on a motorbike to set the world record for a jump then say, 'I guess I'll do it again'. You've done it. I want to do a new stunt."

He does have another eye-catching stunt in mind, though.

In his studio-workshop — the space in fact houses an indoor swimming pool, its surface long since boarded over — there's a metal cage about the size of a small car. Inside it is a grid of 25-centimetre-long metal spikes, suspended upside down, attached to a rope that is itself attached to a winch. At the Athenaeum shows, Cosentino will be inside the box with the spikes suspended above his head. He'll be in a straitjacket, he'll be chained and the door to the cage will be locked. And then the rope will be set on fire. He will have three minutes to escape.

While Cosentino is confident he can stay on just the right side of danger, he says the risk is real. "There is an element of danger, and that's the whole reason you're doing it. If it's too safe, if it's 100 per cent sure, what's the point?"

Impressive as it sounds, the stunt he will perform at the Athenaeum will be the light version. What he's working up to in the full version is a Blaine-like public endurance test with a Houdini-style death-defying finale. He plans to spend 48 hours locked inside the cube, without food or toilet breaks, suspended in a public place. At the end of it, the rope will be set alight.

"I really don't know what that will do to me, whether the body will be cramped up, what effect the wind might have on burning rates. There's a lot we don't know yet."

Some people have asked him if he has a death wish, but he's adamant they're missing the point. "It's about pushing it to the limit where you know it's safe but you're walking that line," he says. "Doing legitimately dangerous escapes, that's when I feel most alive."