An audience member is on stage, their feet hypnotically glued to the floor. Under the influence of magician and mentalist James Phelan, we’ve just seen them unable to count to 10, or remember their own name. Now Phelan has a finger to their brow, to channel into their head the unspoken thoughts of another punter sat in the auditorium. A woman in the back row is invited to summon to mind what she wished to be when she was younger. A pause while she does so, and then: “she wanted to be the Woolworths pick’n’mix lady,” pipes up the mesmerised individual. And the woman in the back row exclaims: “Holy shit!”
Give or take banal speculation about plants in the audience, I have not a scooby how such tricks are accomplished. The mind reels. Phelan, the nephew of TV conjuring stalwart Paul Daniels, occupies most of his set, Showman, with this stuff, and – no matter how many times you’ve seen mind-benders and “neuro-linguistic programmers” do it all before – it’s absorbing to watch an innocent member of the public have the number seven seemingly wiped from her mind, or another one select the very figure between nought and 200 that Phelan requires for his dramatic climax to work.
There’s more conventional magic here too – guessing which cards volunteers select from a pack; making someone’s engagement ring reappear around the stem of a wine glass. I’m not blase about any of it – it’s all amazing! – even if Phelan doesn’t always give these tricks the platform you might wish. He’s personable and entertaining, but his words sometimes run away with him. And the hokum alert sounds loudly from time to time, as he burbles about his own childhood love of magic, straining to give this hour of expert trickery a philosophical significance it does not possess.
No matter: in the same way that Woolworths’ self-assembled confectionery concoctions brought joy to kids everywhere, this telepathy and magic pick’n’mix still offers – at least to guileless onlookers like me – a welcome injection of wonder (How do our minds work? How do his tricks work?!) into the daily routine. It’s an intriguing reminder that the injunction “keep your thoughts to yourself” may not be as straightforward as it sounds.
• At Underbelly Boulevard Soho, London, until 28 June; at Edinburgh festival, 8-29 August.
