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Ivor Cole |
The mind boggles, and then gives up
IVOR COLE
New end theatre
A CROSS between Paul Daniels and Roy Chubby Brown walked on stage at the New End Theatre on Monday night.
He was John Derris, favoured magician and jester of Scandinavian monarchs and the warm up act for the illusionist Ivor Cole.
“Everyone performs twice at the New End Theatre,” he said. “Once on their way up and once on their way down – it’s nice to be back.”
I had met Ivor Cole, 30 years a libel lawyer for the Daily Mail, in Hampstead a fortnight ago for a preview piece. He is a real gent – and genuine good guy. But I must say I was surprised by this addition to his show.
Mr Derris made a series of borderline jokes but one, about a doctor mistaking a jaundiced patient for a Chinese woman was, frankly, disgraceful. I felt ashamed to be there.
Mr Cole, from Hampstead Garden Suburb, is a slick exhibitionist – a true showman. His mind magic is designed to leave the sneer of even the most sceptical cynics suspended in disbelief.
At one with the audience, he moves from some sharp card tricks to death defying stunts like swallowing razor blades. During one word trick my girlfriend leaned over and whispered “hallucinate” seconds before it was revealed as the mystery word on stage. There were, without question, subliminal messages travelling through the air.
The most spectacular exhibition of this came near the end. The audience had brought in their own second hand books and he asked random members to read to themselves a few lines from a random page.
He paused, as if summoning dread demons from the deep, to reveal the gist of the passage. He did this three times and I can imagine no explanation for it.
Mr Cole told me some weeks ago that the art of the magician is the near impossible; to leave the audience baffled but not in fear of the supernatural.
During the show I was invited on stage. A fortnight ago he had given me a sealed container predicting the future week’s stories in the Camden New Journal. On stage on Monday he correctly revealed three stories from this week’s local news and the FA Cup Final result. It was too accurate to be simply intuition. We are speaking of a libel lawyer here, so I tread carefully, but I have a hunch he switched the capsule when I wasn’t looking. I do not know.
But what is certain is that Mr Cole is a master of his art and I imagine his inspiration, the Great Lyle of the 1940s, would be proud to have been there that night. |
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