Naquada

So last night I saw Derren Brown: Something Wicked This Way Comes This Way at the Cambridge Theatre London. I’d waited a long time to see Derren ‘Live’, having missed his last tour, so I was very excited to be seeing this show.

Its a little hard to explain what happens in the show, since it would actually spoil it for you if you’re lucky enough to be going to see the show, and you really do just have to be there to fully understand some of the effects that take place, and how cleverly they are all intertwined . However I’ll try and explain the best I can in the hope that you’ll head down for some of the remain few dates (until July 2nd).

Being a Magician, or having that background I watched the show from two perspectives; The first as the standard member of the audience wanting to have a nights entertainment, and excited to be able to see such a ‘different’ kind of performer up close. The second was from my absolutely fanatical need to understand all the ins and outs of his techniques.

Derren bills his shows and himself as ‘a mix of magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship‘, which is absolutely what it is. As Derren says, this allows him to lie and mislead you sometimes, without feeling guilty about it! A big misconception about Derrens shows (both TV and live) is that people assume he uses stooges (or people in on the act, and saying exactly what he needs to them to say), again with my background and watching the show, there is no need for him to use them (not that he does or has at any point), further enforced by him using my best friend in one effect.

The first half started with a thunderous round of applause as Derren walked confidently onto the stage. As with most of his live shows a ’selector’ was thrown into the audience to pick out helpers for each effect, this time in the form of a monkey in a yellow raincoat. A wonderfully nice touch was that Derren made sure that both the stalls and the circle where involved, in fact most of the evenings selection coming from the circle where I was. In fact my friend was one of the willing volunteers, during an effect into Derren’s ability to tell if people were telling a lie or the truth, moving into a nice little effect of reading a thought from his mind (a surname of a person in the distant past). Every effect was neat, crisp and very much bewildering in every sense, with probably only two of the effects that I honestly really didn’t have any clue on how he managed to be spot on with.

The show is really divided into two halves, as shows normally are, but this was very much more a Yin and Yang type of division between the first and second acts. The first half was very upbeat, funny and what I would call Derren’s normal style of work. The second half started a lot more darker with some fakir type effects (nail hammered into the nose and effects with broken glass) before moving back to a nicely done huge prediction effect, it was especially nice to have the mood lifted back to the light hearted and more mental work, as I’m not a huge fan of Derren doing the putting himself through pain and danger type of effects. Even though, the effects during the second half were still very entertaining and did work well with the other parts of the show.

The final effect really is pretty much what the whole show was all about. Without revealing too much, suffice to say a final prediction involving something from the very start of the show, turning out almost impossibly correct, and defying all logic as to how he could have predicted that single result. Clap hard at the end, as Derren then explains how the whole show was a single exercise of suggestion to get any member of the audience to select that single result for the prediction. Through showing a series of video clips taken during the show he reveals how he’d been suggesting and manipulating us all throughout the show to get that single response at the end. Deviously clever and absolutely un-spottable!!!

Gripping, clever, entertaining and absolutely recommended., One of the best 2 hours and 40 minutes I’ve spent for sometime!!

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 26th, 2005 at 7:44 pm and is filed under Magishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.