Infamous

No I'm not going to try and rob a bank (although part of me says they deserve it after mucking up our ecomany), 'Infamous' is the title of an astonding show I went to see on Monday with my friend at the Theatre Royal, Norwich.

Derren Brown is an illusionist, hypnotist and mathmatical genius.  I can't go into too many details of the show because he asked us all to not spoil the surprises for future audiences.  I'm not sure how many of the audience is going to hold to that plead but I am so, sorry, no spoilers here.  Having spent my childhood as a fellow member of that most abused club 'The Goofballs Obvious', I'm not going to betray a fellow goofball.

I will say, however, if you can get to a ticket to see the show then get one!  It is amazing in every sense of the word!  I can't go into details but I have no idea how he makes some of those acts work, considering he prepared the props months ago.

This in it's own way brings me to a fascinating point.  Derren Brown doesn't believe in psychics.  My agreement with his point of view depends on what meaning he is giving to the word 'psychics'.

If he is talking people who claim to talk to the dead then I most definately agree.  Even if the dead, against all current scientific evidence because our science still can't explain everything, wanted to contact the living they would not do it through a people who was taking money from their loved ones for the privaledge of a conversation.

If he means things like telepathy then I am not so sure I can agree.  I agree that if the talent truely exists then it is very rare in humans but how else can a wolf pack successfully co-ordinate their movemets in the middle of a white out storm?  The other things that point to it, in my mind, come from Derren's own show.  I'm not sure how much I can reveal without spoiling it but I'm going to have a go.  At one point he invited the audience to participate in a mass hypnoses experiment.  I thought I'd give it a go to see if hypnosis really is possible.  I then had to fight to get free of it.  It is not that it was a scary experience in the normal sense of the word but having had people controlling how I behaved because I had no way of fighting them for years, I was not going to surrender control of my mind.  However, as I said, I had to fight to get free of it and it was a struggle.  Therefore is not hypnosis a form of telepathy?  Controlling another persons mind with a few key words repeated over and over?

There other thing was he's various acts of predicting what people were going to say before they said it.  I would say that either he's a telepathic who doesn't realise what he is or he is reading body language on such a minute level it is almost on the subconious and what is that if not telepathy?  Either way it convinced me of where Frank Herbert found the inspiration for the Bene Gesserit method of reading people.

I suppose the only way you could make up your mind as to what you think is to go and see the show.