Mind Tricks
Derren Brown’s new show, Trick or Treat, really left me thinking tonight. He managed to get his target, a 31-year old IT consultant, to think he was a ventriloquist’s dummy. In a dark, surreal music hall, populated by a cardboard audience, the target slowly took on the persona of the dummy he stood next to and was asking questions from. First only hearing the dummy’s “voice” in his head, he eventually spoke like it, taking the posture and jerky mannerisms of the puppet.
Suddenly, Derren Brown declared the show to be over, thanking the “mind-reading doll” he had been holding. As he packed the dummy into its suitcase, the man became panicked and restless. As the suitcase lid closed, he shouted, still in the imagined dummy’s raspy voice: “It’s dark! I can’t see! Don’t leave me!” Brown withdrew offstage, leaving the man shambling blindly around the stage, now shouting, in his own voice, that he didn’t think being left alone in the dark was funny.
It was quite powerful, actually. Surely, should ventriloquist’s dummies feel, they would be frightened of the enclosed darkness of the suitcase, and of being left alone the moment the show is finished? The magic of the theatre gone, the lights out and silence around you - being alone anywhere can be frightening.