MAGIC . ALWAYS BETTER WHEN DISASTROUS.
God bless Mischief Theatre. Eleven years in the past this coming May I noticed THE PLAY THAT GOES WRONG within the tiny downstairs area at Trafalgar Studios (upstairs, a dour Macbeth was giving solution to Pinter). It was contemporary in from the Old Red Lion, the place its creators, Henry Shields , Henry Lewis and Jonathan Sayer started their fringe profession. I’m comfortable to say that my Times assessment drew producer Kenny Wax to drop in, and see that their anarchic student-revue wit was , a uncommon factor, balanced by distinctive and perfectionist self-discipline.
That set in movement a decade of success and awards, up West and on tour (the unique remains to be on the Duchess, Peter Pan Goes Wrong touring the land after Broadway). They have introduced a lot pleasure. It’s the theatrical immediacy that does it: curiously, their TV variations don’t fairly do it, polished as they’re. This is life executed dwell and harmful, correctly, and as an early-adopter Mischievite I’m proud.
Now – after their Magic-goes-Wrong collaboration with veterans Penn & Teller, right here’s Henry Lewis centre stage within the position of a wannabe Derren Brown, an enormous bearded determine of genial ambition contemporary out of divorce, having an ill-advised crack at being inheritor to the nice music-hall magic acts, and getting it incorrect, Tommy-Cooper fashion. Spooky bulletins precede him, audiences put secret phrases in glass bowls, and overhead is a multiply locked safe secure (“suspended till further notice, as I am from the Magic Circle”).
Lewis is instantly humorous, noisily cheerful , portraying a person trying authority with an undertow of desperation. He boasts of a coming Vegas tour below his supervisor “Bob Kojak” (of whom we be taught extra later) and claims membership of an vital on-line chatroom for “high profile men on low incomes”. The two-hour riot of a present is partly very gifted standup – there’s sensible viewers manipulation with out humiliation , everybody delighted to be drawn in – and partly correct theatricality, exaggerated projections and tips, and a operating joke of his incapability to get the sound-effects proper. The pleasure of it although is that typically the mind-reading is brilliantly fortunate and typically the deft tips work – he can do the previous newspaper ripping one, although all of the headlines in it are about how horrible his act is. But typically they don’t. There’s a really British satisfaction in that.
He performs with obviousness. His “guess what colour I am thinking of” is backed by a vibrant orange display and the primary viewers member to return up is in actual fact Jonathan Sayer, a slight, geeky determine unwisely clad in a T shirt saying AUDIENCE MEMBER, later ANOTHER AUDENCE MEMBER. Everyone by now’s guffawing helplessly (it hardly wants the sudden big squirrel). He strikes on to parodic variations of each previous chestnut: the key phrase revealed, the ’30s fashion scientific woo-woo of brains in jars taking part in chess, a few quickfire alleged miracles, a ’20’s fashion ouija-board session with Sayers, and a few Uri Geller tried spoon-bending – now that DOES turn into correct theatre . There’s even a radio mind-reading machine pleasingly insulting the viewers as we seem on the massive display.
We simply stored on laughing, my millennial companion and I and a few 700 hundred others, simply as I did practically eleven years in the past when Mischief first flowered. That’s helpful, greater than ever after the Covid years. MIschief have executed the state some service, and we all know it. Here’s to them.
field workplace theapollotheatre.co.uk to twenty eighth April from 22.50
ranking 4
