★★★★☆
For a company who is “serious about silliness”, Mischief have outdone themselves with a catalogue of successful and comedic shows that play on the tropes of their respective genre or story tropes and completely go awry as things “Go Wrong”. With The Play That Goes Wrong celebrating its 12th anniversary and Peter Pan Goes Wrong touring the UK (and recently stopping at Manchester where we reviewed it).
Mind Mangler: Member of the Tragic Circle follows the same concept in every shape and form. While Peter Pan focused on the elements of a well-established story going spectacularly wrong, from the electrics, to injuries, affairs and arguments, Mind Mangler builds on the concept of a faulty Darren Brown-like stage mentalism and magic show, although less daring in execution than the latter show.
Henry Lewis was spectacular in his starring role as the Mind Mangler himself, with his slightly cocky and overly confident persona often shifting as the character’s reality as a dejected, divorced and bumbling magician comes to light.
Assisted by Jonathan Sayer, who is definitely an “audience member” and not a paid actor as his shirt suggests in bold letters, the Mind Mangler fumbles through his set with sound effect malfunctions, teleprompter errors, tragically erroneous show advertisements, losing money to the rigged cup moving game, a failed Ouija séance, and using the power of suggestion to still guess the wrong colour or object (or did he…).
Before entering, the sense of dread I felt when being handed a pencil and “secrets” card was incomparable… it was an interactive show (dun dun dun). Everyone loves an interactive show unless they are the ones being called out, and I am no exception to this rule. People eagerly handed in their secrets slips, with some being revealed later including one who sewed fish into their ex’s curtains and another who got themselves trapped in a revolving door for an hour (awkward!).
A lot of the funniest gags actually came from the Mind Mangler unexpectedly getting the answers correct and wowing the audience with a moment of competency amongst the chaos. For example, clairvoyantly guessing the secrets of audience members based only on their reactions to his questions, licking and sniffing the air to incorrectly assume the names and jobs of audience members (one of which was sadly not called John as anticipated unlike many of the audience members he asked later!), failing at mental chess, or guessing a random object or colour out of the blue (pun intended).
However, the only downside to these moments where how staged they felt. While I have no clue how they did it, like any magic show, I know there is always a trick to it and being an interactive and rehearsed show made certain moments feel a little lack-lustre as a result.
Maybe it’s the pessimist in me that’s calling it out but certain segments of these correctly done tricks just felt too inexplicable and rehearsed despite using audience members and the secrets they placed in randomly at the start of the show. Some of the jokes also feel like they will make an obvious come-back or are recycled a little too often.
Despite this, the majority of the time, the gags were hilarious, the strongest of which always involved Sayer as the stooge, messing up his lines or being the most obviously planted “audience member” imaginable. Some of these moments also led to the wildest audience heckling moments I’ve ever bourn witness to…
One involved a child calling the Mind Mangler for being a sad divorced man, another occurred during the Mind Mangler accidentally hypnotising himself trick in which one man savagely screamed he should pretend to be a chicken, while another (which ended up being the one chosen) suggested the oddest: a shovel-nosed guitar fish.
The sheer disbelief in Sayer’s tone and the giggling from the “unconscious” Mind Mangler realising he would have to come up with an impression of this mysterious animal was beyond amusing. A lot of these bits would return in some form or another, along with several jokes about IBS that I got a little tired of hearing if I’m honest, but some of these built-up jokes worked extremely well and had audience members howling with laughter as infamous magician bits went sour.
Following in the footsteps of escape artist Harry Houdini, one spectacle had Mind Mangler enter a rather comedically underwhelming “vanishing cabinet”, also known as the Haagen Dazs ice cream machine- his inevitable entrapment and lack of escape leading into the interval as “sleeping gas” fills the cabinet.
The bungling of so many of these traditional and over-done mind-tricks and magic bits is where the show is at its strongest, creating hilariously silly plays on the audience’s expectations, including literally bending the stage lights and microphone instead of a spoon, with his mind!
After a dramatic turn of events with the stooge, in which I again genuinely felt bad for the fumbling actor (just like the crocodile in Peter Pan), a moment of redemption came during the guillotine act which I refuse to spoil, or you might lose your head!
His finale was just as bewildering as the locked box that hung on stage for the entire performance ended up having many of the references to people, objects and colours mentioned in the show.
Overall, the show was a wild concoction of intentionally backfiring traditional magician segments, filled with silly antics and satire that left much of the audience howling with laughter. It’s simple but great humour despite some of its less fine moments feeling a little too staged and some of the working tricks feeling a little too familiar.
Mind Mangler: Member of the Tragic Circle runs at Palace Theatre Manchester until May 18.
JADAR 