Having followed his stage work for years, I find it hard to take a word Derren Brown says seriously. That’s not a criticism: if his lips are moving, I assume there’s devious misdirection afoot, or some hokum designed to dramatise the next feat of jaw-dropping magic and mesmerism. But my scepticism makes things tricky when Brown moves into the territory of real feeling: love, loss, bereavement. Does he belong there? I felt a little uncertain as he conjured with the most delicate feelings of one or two audience members – and indeed with his own.
Sworn as we are to secrecy at the end, I shouldn’t elaborate – save to say that Brown negotiates adroitly the unease generated when trickery and tender hearts come together. And he does so in the service of another fantastic show, his first in the UK for five years. Is it more amazing than those he has delivered before? There’s a coup in the closing moments so mindblowing, so laser-guided, to undermine the hold-out scepticism of an unbeliever like me, that I ended up feeling he had surpassed even himself. With Brown and his co-creators Andy Nyman and Andrew O’Connor, we really are in the presence of masters.
What Brown wishes to demonstrate tonight, as he riffs on fathers, filial love and interpersonal relationships, is how connected we all are, even when we feel isolated. One could question how well his routines enact that conceit while still marvelling at those volunteers hexed into forgetting their own names, or at the punter performing complex tricks under hypnosis that he incredulously denies when woken up. Elsewhere, Brown outsources the telepathy to another audience stooge, apparently fast-tracked to black belt-level mentalism by some mysterious process backstage.
Improbable? I’d say. Inexplicable. Usually, yes, give or take one or two familiar stunts at which I might hazard – but only hazard – a guess. You end up, as ever, completely confounded by Brown’s combination of seamless stage magic and eerie ability to read and manipulate human beings – with a touching emotional pay-off, too.
At the Apollo theatre, London, until 18 March
