It was by no means a sell-out show. In fact, Chris Hare the Mind Boggler’s first task was to pop downstairs to ask if anyone else wanted to come up and view his tricks. I’d like to say this informal start was charming and endearing, but it was desperate.
His stage presence was frantic and bewildering. I couldn’t help wondering throughout whether his lack of organisation was deliberate and supposed to be taken comically, or if he genuinely didn’t know what he was going to do next.
The actual act he performed was fairly impressive, there’s no denying that. Some of his tricks I could not understand how he’d done them for the life of me, such as asking a member of the audience to think of any person and he could guess it outright, or guess someone’s birthday. There was just something terribly mundane about the whole process that I couldn’t get over.
The setting of the upstairs room of The Temple pub was hardly pristine, and I got the feeling that the audience were either buddies of his and so would cheer him on whatever happened or were just there for the ride. Indeed, one infuriating woman decided to shout out two of the answers to the tricks early on, basically ruining that whole part of his act.
Chris Hare himself seemed like a really nice guy, who tried his best to rouse the audience and throw in the odd genuinely amusing pun here and there, but it just didn’t excite me in any way. Once again, his tricks were impressive but just not entertaining. The whole show felt unnecessarily drawn out (an hour in total), anti-climactic, shambolic and left me feeling a bit sorry for him.
