The person sitting opposite me is looking at a picture projected on to the wall behind my head. He asks me to describe the picture without turning round and looking at it. The results are uncanny. The picture I describe is indeed very close to the picture he is observing. And how do we explain the fork that really did seem to heat and bend between our palms? Or the other strange events involving telepathy and ESP that take place in that darkened room with its ancient reel-to-reel tape recorders and outdated equipment, a place where the light occasionally seems to conjure ghostly images and you hear snatches of people talking.
A great deal of theatre relies on sleight of hand and the directed eye, but most of all on the audience's suspension of disbelief. Simply Told's sly little show plays on all three to considerable effect in a piece that casts the audience of two as the protagonists, subjects in a 1980s experiment taking place in a psychic research laboratory. The cunning beauty of the piece is that while afterwards we may ponder how they did it, the truth is that we are doing it to ourselves. We want to believe and so we do, just as we want to believe that fairies exist in Peter Pan or that the actor before us really is King Lear.
Inspired by a real experiment that took place at Washington University in the early 1980s – where psychic researchers were hoaxed by two teenage amateur magicians who appeared to show strong signs of psychic ability – The Alpha Project may be a titbit of an experience, but it's a neat one that cleverly explores the nature of theatre and our willingness to be gulled into seeing what we want to see. Fun, and a wee bit unsettling.
