{"id":6134,"date":"2011-07-10T11:44:24","date_gmt":"2011-07-10T10:44:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=6134"},"modified":"2011-07-10T11:44:52","modified_gmt":"2011-07-10T10:44:52","slug":"derren-brown-the-great-mentalist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=6134","title":{"rendered":"Derren Brown &#8211; the great mentalist"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last night, Vee and I joined our friends Eric and Cindy to attend the Shaftesbury Theatre in central London for a show mounted by the British illusionist <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Derren_Brown\">Derren Brown<\/a>. It is called <a href=\"http:\/\/derrenbrown.co.uk\/tour-dates\/svengali\/\">&#8220;Svengali&#8221;<\/a> and it is the fifth of his theatre tours.<\/p>\n<p>Brown asks his audience not to reveal the nature of the show to others and, of course, I will respect that in this blog posting. Suffice to say that he is a consummate performer.<\/p>\n<p>He gives a fascinating display of talents that are so extraordinary that you could believe that he has supernatural powers, except that you know that it all a brilliantly clever illusion and he never claims otherwise.<\/p>\n<p>But I confess that I didn&#8217;t enjoy the show as much as my companions. I couldn&#8217;t get over the sense of being manipulated, although of course everyone there is by definition paying to be misled and happy about it.<\/p>\n<p>A while ago now, I read Derren Brown&#8217;s\u00a0 book &#8220;Tricks Of The Mind&#8221;\u00a0 and found it, like him, entertaining, scatological and somewhat odd. I reviewed it <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/science.html#TOTM\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last night, Vee and I joined our friends Eric and Cindy to attend the Shaftesbury Theatre in central London for a show mounted by the British illusionist Derren Brown. It is called &#8220;Svengali&#8221; and it is the fifth of his theatre tours. Brown asks his audience not to reveal the nature of the show to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my-life-thoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6134"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6134\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6140,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6134\/revisions\/6140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}