On your Marx, get set, go for magic with a message, as a socialist magician combines alchemy and altruism in his bag of tricks. Dollis Hill resident, Ian Saville has been mixing social justice and sorcery for audiences and political gatherings for the

On your Marx, get set, go for magic with a message, as a socialist magician combines alchemy and altruism in his bag of tricks.

Dollis Hill resident, Ian Saville has been mixing social justice and sorcery for audiences and political gatherings for the last 25 years.

The collectivist conjurer's act includes a chat with Karl Marx and a disappearing money ploy that emphasises the message of sharing.

Mr Saville said: "I believe that we live in an unequal world and I want to make it a little more equal. Magic makes you look at the world in a new way."

The drama teacher and university lecturer added: "It's a way of showing some ideas to people in a more light-hearted way instead of just going through political ideology."

Asked why he thought magic was a good way of getting his political beliefs across, he said: "It's a way of involving people.

"What I do is always a dialogue. I like magic and people often do like magic. Magic gives me another little bit of extra narrative, it makes people look at things in a slightly new way and certainly very rarely have people seen these ideas expressed as magic tricks."

His act takes issues of money and class and puts a new slant on them in a Brechtian dialectic with the audience that provokes and evokes in deliberately equal measures.

"Money is very important and I have a trick which illustrates the nature of how money works in our society, which does involve me borrowing money from people in the audience.

"I also get to have a dialogue with Karl Marx. He was voted recently as the greatest philosopher of all time. In my act, he wonders whether Radio 4 is a revolutionary organisation, Well it's the nearest we've got."

Mr Saville, who now lives in Aylesbury Street in Dollis Hill, said his views came from seeing poverty when he was growing up in Whitechapel, east London, in the 1960s.

And asked what he responded to people who said socialism was outdated, he said: "If you think socialism can't work have a look at what capitalism is doing to the planet and its people.

"A fairer way of organising things has been around for longer.