Lord of Illusions

I've been a huge Derren Brown fan ever since I saw Mind Control on Channel 4 in 2000.

Mixing psychological tricks with sleight of hand, trickery and magic, he manages to produce the most mind-boggling effects. Most of us will have seen him on TV performing his particular brand of illusion, but I was curious to see if he could duplicate this live on stage.

I'm a huge sceptic, which is why I admire Derren so much. He's never claimed to have supernatural powers despite the fact that his “precognitive” abilities are far in excess of any other medium you could care to name.

In fact, he's gone so far as to debunk psychics and mediums as frauds and tonight mentions that he wishes that “false mediums could be imprisoned like they were at the turn of the century”. This very fact marks him as a hero in my eyes. He exposes mediumship as irresponsible and downright dangerous, which is something most mediums wouldn't even consider whilst they're lining their pockets with your hard-earned cash and it's great to see someone who holds his hands up and says, “I don't have any powers, I'm just really good at this”.

The beauty of Derren's show is his ability to astound the ordinary person as well as those who might have a healthy knowledge of some of elementary magic tricks. You know it's a trick – Derren tells you that it is, but as he mentions, “I am often dishonest about my techniques but I'm always honest about my dishonesty”.

For one trick he demonstrates the ideomotor effect, a psychological phenomenon where a person makes movements unconsciously. It's the same effect that can make glasses eerily move around Ouija boards to generate names seemingly from nowhere. I was smugly sitting there thinking “right, I've got this sussed” but then Derren makes a table levitate two feet off the ground. It was at this point where I just stared open-mouthed “Riiigghhhht... I've got no idea...”.

For the second half Derren performs the Oracle Act, predicting incredibly accurate information about audience members from sealed cards with questions written inside that were placed in a bowl during the interval.