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.
