MIND GAMES.

London

MIND GAMES

Ambassadors Theatre
Tue-Sat 8.45 Sun 4pm & 7pm Mat Sat 2.15pm
Runs 1hr 30min No interval

TICKETS 020 7369 1761
Review Timothy Ramsden 5 May

An astounding 90 minutes, confounding any explanation and leaving you sure no secret's safe these days.It's unlikely any theatre's seen the like of American Marc Salem's act, which, in a neat body and mind season, plays in repertoire with The Vagina Monologues.

You might - just – conceive of attaining the concentration to achieve Salem's opening feat, correctly attributing 5 pictures to the audience members who, as instructed, deny having drawn them.

It's a matter of vocal and physical tics when honest people lie. But playing the human polygraph is only, as Salem puts it, warming up. In fact, he's barely got the chill off. And despite touches of the showman – one-line patter jokes and fake mistakes – he repeatedly denies any cheating. Which could itself be a con, except mirrors and lenses wouldn't explain his tricks and if it's a matter of stooges, he'd have to be paying off too many of the audience.

Halfway through, and lukewarm by now, Marc seems more shaman than huckster. How else explain the cassette-recording predicting the total of a series of numbers just obtained from audience members?

What really recalls, with a shudder, that Salem was where they burned witches, is the part of his act where Marc correctly predicts a three-digit number selected spontaneously by someone phoned out of the blue on an audience member's mobile – and yes, the lady in the Stalls chose who she'd ring.

So it's almost no surprise when, in his white-heat finale, Salem not only recognises, blindfold, objects from the audience, he tells what letter's inscribed on a bangle, that the rubik cube's half worked-out and makes the watch leap 45 minutes forward by a touch on the strap. His onstage audience assistants here are both doctors, so you have to trust them.

Salem tells us he mixes academic research with legal consultancies and this remarkable show. If it were all a trick, it'd be worth catching anyway, as a connoisseur's con. And, recalling how he casually names (male) audience members and tells them which foreign place each is thinking about, I'm confident Salem will have read this review word for word long before it was written.

Performer: Marc Salem

Designer: Dora Schweitzer

2002-05-06 09:41:32