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By the end of the first half of Derren Brown’s five-starred, critically acclaimed, supposedly mass hysteria-inducing show, the members of the audience around me are feeling a bit flat.
Subdued, anticlimactic and fidgety, even.
Because despite being London’s most sought-after ticket, so far Brown’s show — Miracle — has not been all that, er, miraculous.
‘If I hadn’t paid so much for a ticket and didn’t live so far away, I’d be off to the pub now,’ said Paul, 34, here with his girlfriend Sue on an overnight trip from Coventry. ‘I’m not sure what I really expected, but it wasn’t just a magic show.’
Enduring popularity: Made famous through his television appearances, every one of the 172 dates of this seventh tour will sell out
‘A very good magic show,’ says Sue. ‘But still just a magic show.’
To be fair, it is good. And very clever.
Brown reads people’s minds, writes down their thoughts and hides them in giant blue balloons, before they’ve even had them. He throws Quality Street sweeties into the audience and correctly guesses which flavour particular members of the audience are eating. Goodness only knows how.
Using endless cunning distraction tricks, he steals coins from a man who can’t seem to stop him, seven times in a row.
He dishes out self-help tips and cod psychology. He encourages a girl called Charlotte to write her name on a light bulb, wrap the bulb in a napkin, smash it with a hammer and then happily eat a shard of glass, followed by a slice of apple and a swig of mineral water — all, apparently, to show her, and us, how to confront our fear.
It’s clever and it’s entertaining — but then, it should be. Derren, from Purley, is the most successful (and, I’d guess, highest-paid) psychological illusionist in the world and the ticket prices — £87.50 for a decent stalls seat — reflect that.
Elated: The power that Derren Brown wields over his audience is astonishing
His television series attract record audiences. Every one of the 172 dates of this tour (his seventh) will sell out, and his fans (he has more than 2.2 million Twitter followers) are slavish in their love.
But today, the world of illusion is becoming an increasingly cluttered place.
As well as Derren, there’s not only his brilliant TV rival Dynamo but also The Illusionists, a gang of seven magicians who perform just down the road on Shaftesbury Avenue, and endless other mentalists usurping the tired old guard of Paul Daniels, Uri Geller and permatanned David Copperfield.
Off the telly, Brown is small, shaven, neatly suited and hares about Shaftesbury Avenue’s Palace Theatre like a child who’s had too many fizzy drinks, saying ‘f***’ quite a lot, to the delight of the predominantly young audience.
Energy: Brown had the audience eating out of the palm of his hands in an extraordinary performance of illusion and mysticism
His energy is extraordinary, and his manner with his audience volunteers (he continually reminds us that he never places ‘helpers’ in the audience) is warm and jokey.
Yet no one around me can quite understand why Miracle has generated such a critical outpouring of love: why, for once, the critics have bowed to his demand to ‘keep the show a secret’, not to give anything away.
Or why, dare I say it, the star of the two-and-a-half-hour show had the temerity to call it Miracle in the first place.
Guessing the flavour of sweets? Stealing coins? This is the man who once played Russian roulette with a loaded revolver on live television, for goodness sake. Who once persuaded a group of law-abiding citizens to commit armed robbery on TV and convinced a man with vertigo to emergency-land a plane.
We don’t know him, but he knows our name, age and shoe size and can write down what’s in our minds before we’ve even thought it.
Derren, real name Darren, was always a bit different.
The eldest son of a swimming teacher dad and wedding dress model mum, he was privately educated and spent his teenage years alternately being bullied, shoplifting (he stopped only when he was hauled up in Harrods for stealing a Luther Vandross music cassette) and battling with the conflicting demands of his homosexuality and being an evangelical Christian.
He once even went on a weekend retreat to ‘cure’ himself, but gave up God instead and is now a committed atheist.
As well as ‘religious quackery’, he also hates homeopathy, psychics and everything ‘bogus’, and has always been more interested in tapping into the human mind than turning handkerchiefs into budgerigars. His 20s — after studying law and German at university and discovering his metier after watching a hypnotism show — were spent mostly alone, occasionally performing in Bristol bars and restaurants in a long cape, sporting a big dangly earring.
He devised cunning ways to con his way out of parking tickets, blag free meals at restaurants and somehow persuade bookies to pay out on losing bets at the races (he is reportedly banned from every casino in Britain).
But his big break came in 2000 when television executives came knocking and he made the series Derren Brown: Mind Control.
He has never looked back and now lives happily with his partner Marc in a very eccentric London home filled with stuffed giraffes, penguins and a moray eel.
TV and stage star: Derren Brown's latest show (or the second half, anyway) was gripping and utterly inexplicable
But back to the show. The interval bell sounds and we prepare for the second half. There is not much excited chatter. No one rushes for their seat. Ladies linger in the loos, chatting.
‘I thought it’d be really dramatic but I’m still waiting to be wowed,’ says Charlotte Butter, from Croydon. ‘And why is he so choosy about picking volunteers?’ says her friend Bev, a nurse. ‘I kept putting my hand up but he didn’t seem to like the look of me.’
Throughout the show, Brown selects his ‘random’ targets with care. A giant balloon bounces around the audience, whoever catches it stands up, and he assesses them.
It’s all about susceptibility. Some people, such as Ben — a great big smiley labrador of a man — are considered ‘perfect’ by Brown, others are dismissed out of hand.
But then the lights dim, the second half starts and, well, it’s absolutely breathtakingly brilliant.
Gone are the magic tricks, the coins and the sweeties.
Instead he orders everyone to stand, hold hands, close our eyes, ‘suspend our belief’ and ‘just go with it’ as Brown sends us to an imaginary beach to think positive thoughts, expel the negative from our body and ‘take ownership of it’.
So far, still unmiraculous. But then — spoiler alert — it changes.
Suddenly he adopts the language and trappings of a cheesy evangelical faith healer, quoting Biblical-sounding verse and promising to change our lives, awaken our inner powers, heal ourselves.
With a hot light shining on us, eyes still closed, we are ordered to banish our pain and ailments. To feel them leaving our bodies. And then sit back down again.
Next, he asks if anyone feels different, feels ‘cured’, feels released from their pain. And, amazingly, people really seem to.
Five minutes later we watch slack-jawed as a lady with rheumatoid arthritis can move her hands and feet freely and without pain for the first time in five years. And a bearded chap called Jack with a titanium plate in his skull feels the pressure in his head ease for once.
Suddenly, a pretty girl called Emily with glasses doesn’t need them. Eleven years of chronic neck pain floats into the ether from a stocky rugby player. An Aussie girl with a frozen shoulder regains full movement.
We clap and cheer and whoop — cynics included — as he yells: ‘Praise the Lord!’
A smirking ‘disbeliever’ is rendered temporarily unable to read, as if all the letters have been jumbled up in his mind, to serve him right for doubting. Even I start wondering if my sore knee is cured. It isn’t.
As Brown shouts ‘We thank you, Father, we thank you. We are surrounded by a golden light!’ volunteers are hypnotised and knocked out in seconds, lowered gently to the floor.
One man levitates — I’ve no idea how. Another lifts a previously unliftable suitcase full of bricks. At one stage, more than 30 people are queueing patiently in the stalls to be ‘healed’.
They volunteer themselves, but of course he already knows their names, their ailments, their brothers’ names, their mum’s back problems. Afterwards, they skip back to their seats, beaming and golden from his touch.
The point, of course, is to prove Brown’s belief that faith healing and miracles are all in the mind — and the work of clever showmen like him, rather than God.
You may or may not agree, but the show (or the second half, anyway) was gripping, utterly inexplicable — however much we all picked over it afterwards — and, for a while, it really felt miraculous. And that’s not even revealing the brilliant twist at the end.
So I take it all back. No one could fail to be impressed. Other than a genuine charlatan Christian faith healer.
And, perhaps, Emily, who ten minutes later had her specs back on again.