I’ve long heard rave reviews for The Crick Crack Club. For more than 35 years, the live storytelling events have been lighting up venues in London, Bristol, Dorset and, yes, Oxford, where they have a monthly-ish spot at the Story Museum. The performers and themes vary, but there’s always a fairy tale quality (think Grimm’s, not Disney) to the shows, and a reverence for the spoken word.

This evening was no exception. In The Magician’s Apprentice, performance storyteller Sally Pomme Clayton brews a potent blend of myths, fairy tales, science and riddles to create something intoxicating.

Before the show begins, Clayton offered us each a tarot card and brief reading, setting the tone for a mysterious and magical evening. Clayton with the classic magician’s top hat, wand and suitcase, arriving on the stage brandishing her mandoline. In a glittery falsetto, she sang of fortune’s ever-turning wheel, a refrain she’d return to at the middle and end of the show.

The performance began grounded in reality. Clayton recounted a school trip to the pier at Weston Super Mare. Nine years old, a 50p fare to a magic show allowed her to live out a dream: being a magician’s apprentice. But the dream was short lived: discovering the magician’s magic was not, in fact, real magic she loudly announced this to the audience, and was removed from the stage. But this did not deter Clayton’s enchantment with enchantment: if anything, it made her more determined to seek out ‘real magic’ and perhaps also to question why it was that the apprentices were always young and female, the magicians always men.

So began the night’s collection of stories. Drawing from a deck of tarot card (and pulling ideas from the ones she’d given to the audience earlier), Clayton spoke of knights and fools, magicians turning mad and girls transforming into doves.

She performed surrounded by a circle of objects - a drum shaped like a crescent moon, a shiny gong, the classic magician’s top hat, suitcase and wand, a mirror - which offered a ritualistic set, and each got employed in turn, to mesmerizing effect. Rattles conjured the sound of running water. Snaking metal ribbons summon the sound of a djinn king’s magic, a tiny red bird call seems to fill the whole room with the sound of nature. Although in reality there was simply one woman onstage talking, the evening felt like a multisensory experience. I could practically smell the nonexistent incense burning, especially with the beautifully intimate, golden-lit venue of the Story Museum’s woodshed.

In addition to the tarot cards, Clayton employed the scientific wonder of the mobius strip to underline a point about the endless nature of fate and time. The stories ebbed and flowed together, centring eventually on the Russian folklore character Elena the Wise, an all powerful female magician, to carve out a surreal, feminist and truly vivid narrative.

Ultimately the evening was like binge-reading a Niel Gaiman novel - utterly beguiling storytelling. The Crick Crack Club definitely lived up to its hype - I’m already looking forward to the next session.