Where is my mind? (Derren Brown live 2007)

Last night, Lisa and I went to see Derren Brown – Mind Reader ‘an evening of wonders’, at the Birmingham Hippodrome. The Hippodrome is a fantastic theatre, in that the lobby and layout is so small you can just leave the theatre at the interval, and wonder off for a drink from a shop, at a reasonable price. You’re not held captive in their bar, paying extortionate prices for drinks. The theatre itself is fantastic. We had the best seats in the house (in my opinion) smack bang in the centre of the circle, giving the best view of the stage, and out of the way of being picked on (this turned out to be false, as Derren uses frisbee's to choose participants). We sat on the very front row last week for Scooby Doo, and the stage was too high, the circle is definately the place to sit!

Both Lisa and I are big Derren Brown fans. Lisa likes the whole package (leave it), whereas I am particularly intrigued by the psychological aspect. We’ve seen all his shows, and I have also read one of his books, have his ‘trade’ videos, and have even studied psychology. When we watch his TV programme (next one this Friday, channel 4, 10.30), I always try to figure out how he’s manipulating his subjects, ‘psychologically’. Lisa tries to figure it out by looking at the whole thing on as a whole. We rarely suss his tricks out.

Live, Derren is something else. Probably due to the fact that these tricks feel a lot more ‘hardcore’ when they’re done just a few feet in front of you, where the audience participation is random. You’re away from the safety net of TV where you can have doubts about the participation of stooges or plants. This proven to be an absolute impossibility in Derren’s latest live show. Over two hours, he tricked us into not noticing a man in a gorilla suit stalking the stage for a banana, got a man to lose a 5000 wager, and a whole other manner of tricks, all of which led up to the second half.

Whereas the first half was more trickery, the second half was heavier, and the show tried to recreate the 30’s, when people flocked to see ‘Oracles’. Derren has made it clear on numerous occasions that he doesn't believe in psychic abilities. He has displayed this in his one hour specials, such as seance, and goes into greater details about how 'psychics' employ their techniques in his 'trick of the mind' book. For the Oracle act, members of the audience throughout the interval, wrote questions, and sealed them in a black envelope, with just their initials and row number on the envelope. They then put them in a bowl onstage. After setting the scene by doing a levitation trick with a table, and table-shifting (all done through subconscious physical pulses, as explained in his book ‘trick of the mind’, Derren gave the answers to the questions within, by what I guess was using cold-reading. It was astounding.

I won’t mention the finale in case anyone reading this is going to see him, but me and Lisa tried to suss it out all the way home (a one-hour drive), then went through it at home, then we went through the programme looking for clues that may have persuaded us. We come up with nothing. I then couldn’t sleep for thinking about it, and when I finally succumbed, I had a dream I was in the auditorium, and Derren was sitting behind me, hitting my head with a stick.

I woke up with a headache. Literally.