The West End is forever in danger of being turned into a giant TV variety studio: three West End musicals, of course, have already had their original leads cast by public vote on reality television, with a fourth on the way; while The Sound of Music replaced its TV found star, Connie Fisher, with Summer Strallen, who was first introduced into the show not on the stage of the London Palladium but via a set up on TV’s Hollyoaks. Plays, too, are regularly cast nowadays from the ranks of inexperienced TV and film actors.
Last week’s opening episode of the new series of Channel 4’s Peepshow made surprisingly prescient fun of this. Mark and Jeremy arrange to go on a double-date to the theatre - and Jeremy assures his sceptical friend that the prospect of going to see a play wasn’t something to be afraid of: “It’s all different now,” he says. “They’ve moved on. They use proper actors, you know, Americans, and people off the telly, and they’re all based on films, so its fine.”
Since Jeremy is played by Robert Webb - who next week makes his West End debut in Neil LaBute’s Fat Pig, alongside My Family’s Kris Marshall and Gavin and Stacey’s Joanna Page - he is literally proving the point.
But though the packed houses that Derren Brown has previously played to at the Palace and Cambridge Theatres and is now doing all over again at the Garrick are no doubt in large part thanks to his television celebrity, he’s a throwback to something that is even more vintage: a purveyor of live magic tricks, who he can create a séance live onstage that seems to make a table levitate, or who deliberately dispels the notion that he has psychic powers but then goes on to lock into what people are thinking about around the auditorium, and proceeding to identify them by name, age and even day of birth.
The tour-de-force centrepiece of An Evening of Wonders, his latest show that I saw last night, was to recreate the pedigree of oracle acts - performers who could provide answers to questions posed to them anonymously, identify the poser, and then “know” things that only the poser could. As it happens, I have a friend in my life who is known as the Oracle, too - and is one of my most regular theatre companions - but his ability isn’t psychic: he just has phenomenal recall of the kind of detail that puts google and Wikipedia to shame. It’s not that he is merely encyclopaedic, not just about the theatre and also about my life (he’s able to tell me what I’ve seen and who was in it from years back), but that he can make connections between things that google and Wikipedia only do if you put the right searches in.
Just as an actor steps forward at the end of every performance of The Mousetrap to ask audiences not to spoil the surprise of future audiences by revealing whodunit, Brown also has his publicity agent give press a sealed envelope - labelled “Please do not read until after the performance” - that requests “a small point of co-operation from you”, and politely goes on to say, “I wonder if you would be good enough to withhold any specific revelations in your reviews that might accidentally spoil surprises in the show.” One of the things it asks us to avoid are “detailed speculations about how the Oracle Act might be achieved”.
I wouldn’t actually know how to begin to wonder how he does it; I just sit there in stunned wonder. Of course there’s a trick to it, somehow; and as he himself says at one point, acts like this are a testament to our “need to believe” - everyone’s looking for answers, and maybe even a popular entertainer can provide them. But I’m also more than a little spooked by stories like the one that a friend told me over lunch only yesterday, where she went to Las Vegas with a well-known psychic - and as they walked past a particular slot machine, the psychic froze and declared that it was about to pay out. My friend immediately put a coin in, and hit the jackpot. The only problem was that it was a one cent machine, so she won 340 cents, instead of $3,400 if it had been a dollar machine!
My friend suggested that they continue to work the machines elsewhere, but the psychic declined: it would be an abuse of her powers to do so, she claimed. None of it, of course, is as easy as the likes of Brown make it look - or intentionally make it go wrong so that he can then make it right! But a Norwegian executive for Shell, sitting beside me last night, proved that sometimes things just go wrong: he pulled out a card deck that he happened to carry with him and tried out some card tricks with us - but they simply didn’t work. Though Brown denies there are any plants in the house, I started to wonder: was he one, designed to make us appreciate Brown even more?
Gosh, Mark. You are becoming a tele-addict!
Mark,
If you like Derren Brown, try this guy next time you are in New York:
http://www.chambermagic.com/
He does the Oracle trick you mention, but also several more that are *amazing*.
Even better, he does it in a hotel suite at the Waldorf Astoria so there are only 30 people in the room watching...up close!