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Derren Brown |
Devilish Brown’s talent mystery
DERREN BROWN
Adelphi Theatre
SMALL, manipulative and sharp as Satan’s toenails, Derren Brown claims he can read people like books, just by observing bodily ticks and linguistic hints.
Anyone who has seen Brown’s TV specials or his live shows will find these claims hard to refute.
But you can also tell a lot about a magician from his audience.
The foyer before the main event last week was unsurprisingly packed with fans of the goatee’d showman, but the demographic was not the one you might expect.
Only a few of the crowd had the anaemic pallor of amateur magicians or suburban Goths; the vast majority were young men in pink polo shirts and girls in varying combinations of stilettos and leggings.
“It looks like a Primark office outing,” Brown joked at one point. Whether he found the observation amusing or frustrating was difficult to tell.
The problem is that, at some level, a mind reader is only as good as the minds he reads. Much of the show is subject to embargo, so as not to spoil the wonders for future audiences, but it is not giving too much away to describe a trick where Brown guesses a particular memory of a member of the public. The man who climbed up on stage was crew- cut, with his fists clenched and his shirt hanging out. “You’re thinking of a fight you once had,” deduces Brown. He is correct.
Of course, Brown takes the encounter much further than this, to truly staggering levels of detail.
But you can’t help thinking that a man of his talent should be picking the brains of world leaders and reclusive geniuses, not people who move their lips when they think. Why has no one organised an interview with Kim Jong-il yet? Or Donald Rumsfeld? We’d get some answers then.
Perhaps, in a show about enigma, that is the greatest mystery of all. Brown does not deserve the corny connotations often applied to magicians: he is an apt historian of the so-called paranormal, and a rational, intelligent and unpatronising host. Manipulating people so keen to be manipulated, however, makes him no better than an advertising executive.
If we are to see the best of Derren Brown, he must find an audience that challenges him.
Until July 18
0870 403 0303 |
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