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AN the audience is on stage, their feet hypnotically glued to the floor. With the help of psychic and psychic James Phelan, we just saw them unable to count to 10, or remember their name. Now Phelan has a finger on their foreheads, to drive into their heads the unspoken thoughts of another punter sitting in the hall. A woman in the back row is invited to reminisce about her childhood dreams. A pause as she does so, and then: “she wanted to be a Woolworths pick’n’mix woman,” she lifts up the curious man. And the woman who is in the back row is shouting: “Zintutu!
Give or take the banal fantasy of plants in the audience, I have no scooby how these tricks are possible. The mind trembles. Phelan, nephew of Former TV personality Paul DanielsOccupies many of his prepared, Showman, and these things, and – no matter how many times you have seen mind-benders and “neuro-language programs” do everything before – and absorb the look of an innocent member of society and the number seven seems to wipe his mind, or someone to choose the most picture between the empty and 200 that his dramatic that Phelamax that dramaticn.
There’s a bit of casual magic here too – just thinking about the cards the volunteers choose from the pack; making someone’s engagement ring reappear around the stem of a wine glass. I didn’t hate it at all – it’s amazing! – although Phelan doesn’t offer the options you need. He is personable and fun, but his words sometimes escape him. And the warning of hokum is sounded loudly from time to time, as he talks about his childhood love of magic, he is forced to give this hour of professional deception a philosophical meaning that it does not have.
No matter: in the same way that the self-assembled Woolworths confectionery brought joy to children everywhere, telepathy and magic pick’n’mix still provide – at least for blind people like me – a welcome injection of wonder (How do our minds work? How do tricks work?!) in everyday life. It’s an interesting reminder that the command to “keep your mind” may not be as straightforward as it sounds.
