James Phelan: Showman review – an amazing pick’n’mix of telepathy and magic
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Underbelly Boulevard, London
Audience members become unsuspecting mind-readers, and numbers disappear from their memory, in this hugely entertaining show
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.
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