When Mischief came to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013 with The Play That Goes Wrong, it wouldn’t have taken a fortune teller to know that the company had a hit on their hands. Following nine years of incredible success that has seen the show tour and transfer to Broadway, plus inspire multiple spin-offs, Mischief are back at the Pleasance Courtyard with Mind Mangler: Member of the Tragic Circle for the 75th Edinburgh Fringe.
The Mind Mangler is a spin off from the company’s wildly popular Magic Goes Wrong, which had a successful (though Covid interrupted) run in the West End. One of Mischief’s founding members, Henry Lewis, plays the chronically bad mind reader, with an over inflated ego to boot.
Like the shows that have preceded it, the comedy in Mind Mangler comes from when things go wrong, and they go wrong a lot. Of course, from a performance point of view, it is much harder to do things wrong on purpose than it is for them to happen naturally. But Mischief are easily now the masters of this, and pull it off to perfection every time.
There’s lots of audience interaction here, as the Mind Mangler attempts to deduce people’s occupations or their deepest secret. Several audience members chosen at random bear a striking resemblance to fellow Mischief co-founder Jonathan Sayer, who here plays the role of the Stooge, and provides the storyline that sits alongside the mind-reading trickery.
The Mind Mangler is particularly clever on two counts; firstly it uses the most well-known methods of mind reading and parodies them, and secondly, it does pull off some genuinely impressive feats of mentalism. For Magic Goes Wrong, the team worked with magic legends Penn and Teller, and it shows here in the performance from Henry Lewis who works the crowd like a Las Vegas stalwart.
Hilariously funny and magically exciting, The Mind Mangler is a glorious hour of comedy and old fashioned magic, that will have audiences begging for more.
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