I have been sworn to secrecy along with almost 2,000 others who joined me at the Bristol Hippodrome to see Derren Brown performing Showman last night. Much of the show was what you would expect from the well-known mentalist.
It’s difficult to say whether I would have paid up to £43 to see the show, knowing that in good time it is likely that I will be able to enjoy it from the comfort of my own living room where I need not fear public humiliation in front of thousands if not millions if my cameo appearance were to end up on television later down the line.
The master of illusion appears to have a good heart underneath the somewhat insulting jokes directed at the willing pawns from the audience, many of them named Joe on this occasion, a coincidence that not even Derren himself may have predicted. As always, the award-winning performer practiced a sincere form of deception and those who joined him on the stage were fully aware of the game they were playing, even if they were unable to recall their experience afterwards.
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Although I didn’t personally connect emotionally with the show in the way the person sat next to me did, who was bawling her eyes out by the end, or the gentleman in front whose deafening claps were at times distracting, I think I may have been briefly hypnotised for a moment, but I’m not sure.
I felt tired and distracted and instead of staying present in the moment, I was trying too hard to focus on the magician himself and ended up missing what was important. As he counted down, there were missing parts to my recollection of events and the time that passed at that moment appeared much faster than it actually was.
I have never been hypnotised before and when my head fell forward for a brief moment, I remember thinking at the time that I had chosen to do that so I could get a moment of rest. Upon reflection, what appeared to be my free will was not of my own choosing and without Derren’s honesty about his dishonesty I would have never known.
I may have set my expectations too high and in some ways the show was more predictable than I had anticipated. Derren told me in our telephone interview ahead of the show that he had matured and therefore his shows had matured with him, but I enjoyed the immature pranks more than the personal revelations, which I failed to form any connection with.
Derren is a critic of the self-help genre in its most popular form, and encourages the embracing of imperfection and warns against the dangers of positive thinking. I would have certainly got more out of the show if I had taken his advice.
Not to say that the show wasn’t full of impressive tricks and moments of amazement where he somehow manages to capture a person’s exact thoughts, word for word. But as Derren quite clearly states on many occasions, he has a skill of putting thoughts into people’s heads as well as taking them out.
There were certainly many unanswered questions that make you wonder whether the intricate thoughts that were known by Derren before anyone entered the theatre doors, were ever those of the individual on stage in the first place or had simply been planted into their brain beforehand.
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