It's not mind-reading, says mind-reader of the moment, Derren Brown. It's "suggestion, misdirection, psychological techniques and blagging". Brown's West End run capitalises on his TV notoriety: last month's screen seance was one of the most-complained-about shows in telly history.
On opening night, this Russian roulette survivor fired one or two blanks: on a cavernous plastic-gothic set, some tricks were more transparent even than he intended, and his persona is a tad smarmy. For all that, he debunks the conjuror's mystique, however, Brown's ability to manipulate and interpret his volunteers can be as breathtaking as the most inexplicable magic.
The debunking, in any event, is part of the patter. Brown delights in hamming up his supposedly subliminal suggestions to volunteers - not least because that compounds their confusion. As he deduces the hand in which the coin is held, he talks us through the battle of wits between mind-reader and subject; the tangled thicket of guess and second-guess in which everyone gets lost but him. It's thrilling to think that we're as readable as Brown claims. It's disappointing when, in his first routine, a woman in row H twice gets the better of him.
But that's rare. For the rest of the first act, the gasp factor is high as Brown facilitates mind-reading between two volunteers, and demonstrates total recall of the west London telephone directory. If there isn't a great variety before the interval, Brown changes the tone for the occult, spine-tingling act two.
Having made a virtue of his lack of artifice, the occasions when Brown asks us to take him seriously whiff more than usually of humbug. He errs, too, in climaxing with a trick that US counterpart Marc Salem recently performed as a mere hors d'oeuvre to his own show, Mind Games. Otherwise, the evening is as pleasing as even the non-psychics among us anticipated; full of provocative feats of perception, with some enjoyably baroque drama thrown in.
· Until June 26. Box office: 020-7494 5094.
