Theatre review:Mind Mangler: Member of the Tragic Circle

While Mischief Theatre is still happily franchising around the world, its original cast have been doing more work separately since the TV show. Probably less of a big gossip-worthy falling out and more of a "The Play That Goes Wrong is celebrating a decade in the West End and they might fancy a change" thing, and the core writing trio of Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields are still together for their latest show, a spin-off from Magic Goes Wrong: Mind Mangler: Member of the Tragic Circle has Lewis reprise his titular psychic for a full two hours. He's joined by Sayer as Steve the Stooge, the Mind Mangler's flatmate who comes out of the audience in a series of impenetrable disguises (a T-shirt that says "audience member" and later a T-shirt that says "different audience member") and still can't manage to help get the tricks right.

This is essentially an extended version of the character's section of Magic Goes Wrong, even including a couple of gags Alex had remembered from when we saw that show, but with both the peril and the running subplot all falling to Lewis this time.

So there's an undercurrent of the magician's current failures stemming from his recent divorce (the "Tragic Circle" of the title is because he made the mistake of letting his ex-wife's sister's company print the posters) and of the Stooge causing a number of disasters in his life off-stage as well as on. With a mix of real audience interaction and some actual plants, audience participation is a large part of the show, although (with the exception of the front few rows who get called on) this is pretty much on a voluntary basis.

As usual there's not much I can say beyong listing jokes - the mind-reading trick where the ASM (Lloyd McDonagh) is giving the Mangler clues from behind the volunteer's back, the chess game pitting the Mangler's superior brain against four brains in jars (the jars get checkmate in four moves,) the Ouija board trick where the Stooge speeds things up by pointing to "L" then the board's name to christen the ghost "Luigi" - and say that you probably know by now if Mischief's humour is for you or not. I know it is, as do at least three of my friends - I could hear Alex, Phill and Vanessa all howling with laughter at times.

But the original show was co-created by Penn & Teller, and Ben Hart has returned as magic consultant, so Hannah Sharkey's production also plays the trick of increasingly throwing in some genuine tricks, building up to a guillotine finale whose punchline is as well-executed as it is inevitable. After all, there's not a lot of better distraction techniques than keeping an audience laughing for two hours to stop them noticing the sleight of hand.

Mind Mangler: Member of the Tragic Circle by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields, based on characters originally created by Penn Jillette, Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer, Henry Shields & Teller, is booking until the 28th of April at the Apollo Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue; then continuing on tour to Manchester, Cambridge, Birmingham, Hull, Milton Keynes, Liverpool and Bath.

Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Pamela Raith.