FROM Shakespeare’s As You Like It to Mark Twain, who believed you could not have too much good whisky, there have been variants of the saying ‘You can’t have too much of a good thing’. In the world of entertainment, there are all too many examples when this saying doesn’t hold water.
Most notorious is the cinema, with some titles having V or VI after them and the quality deteriorates with each new episode. Clever writers of TV comedy series such as Fawlty Towers, Some Mothers Do Have ‘Em and The Vicar of Dibley, knew exactly when to draw the line,and their legacy is classic comedy.
After the enormous success of The Play that Goes Wrong, still running after ten years in London’s West End, followed with varying success by Peter Pan, The Comedy about a Bank Robbery and A Christmas Carol (all going wrong), you could begin to wonder if authors Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields, have returned to this comedy well once too often with this, a spoof on the great magic shows.
Had they stuck slavishly to the knockabout physical comedy which is such an essential part of those previous hits, it would be reasonable to say the format had been fully explored and required a rest. In Mind Mangler the trio has cleverly moved away from farcical comedy, and moved into the world, so beloved by the late great Tommy Cooper, where genuine magic tricks rub shoulders with disastrous deliberate mistakes.
There is, I am glad to report, no attempt to guy Tommy Cooper or his act – Henry Lewis’s Mind Mangler is an original creation, not a cardboard cut-out. Assisted by Jonathan Sayer as the world’s most obvious planted stooge, and occasionally by Tom Wainwright, Henry goes through hypnotism routines, find the lady (in this case a £20 note) and a guillotine beheading, all unsuccessfully performed. He also comes up, particularly with the informative long list at the end of the show, with some cracking-good pieces of magic.
If you are one of those people who cringe at the thought of being drawn into participating in the show, stay well out of sight, because Henry and Jonathan are merciless in their pursuit of comedy at the expense of audience members. That said, they are never unkind, milking every chance of producing a laugh, but skipping quickly away from any audience member who is obviously not enjoying being part of the show.
I sat inconspicuously hiding among some very willing members of the audience who our two skillful practitioners exploited to the full for laughs. Mind Mangler may not generate the full- scale hilarity that The Play That Goes Wrong does, but in exploring a rather different style of comedy, it does provide a fulsome evening of entertainment and fun.
GRP