Confessions of a Conjuror

by Derren Brown

  Like most people, I prefer tables by the window, and my favourite local table is in a modest Starbucks overlooking a high street from just around a corner in a side-alley. This fortuitous positioning offers both a bright and busy view of passing London life and a discreet vantage point that means only those few people using the side-alley would be aware of me at all. The fact that I love a bustling backdrop when reading or working in such a place confirms for me that I am very much a city rather than a country type; to gaze out of one’s window at a lonely pastoral panorama would be to deny oneself the joy of periodically observing the masses and would not provide the regular, intermittent distractions necessary to keep working for an afternoon. From inside a warm café, through a picture window, we can view pedestrians across the road for far longer than they think (they may be aware of being seen from inside shops and eating-houses on their side of the road, but rarely do they consider whether they are being watched from the other). Our eyes can settle unsympathetically upon walloping fatties and then dart to crack-heads and on to toddlers and well-dressed elderly couples. We can judge them all as clichéd and ridiculous or feel a warm glow of love for them, depending on our sentimental state at the time or what we are reading. Alternatively, we can play the private game of if-you-had-to-shag-one-person-on-the-street-who-would-it-be. All options are open to us.

  Meanwhile, if we wish, we can enjoy a direct and more scrupulous scrutiny of fellow patrons seated inside the café and the delightful tension that comes from knowing that they might look up and catch our eye at any time. In the café, we can observe more delicate and private behaviours: we can see with what combination of sugars, sugar-substitutes and/or flavoured dustings people prefer to drink their coffee; how they deal with becoming entangled inelegantly as they try to remove coat, scarf and headphones in the wrong sequence and suddenly become self-conscious; what exaggerated expression of exhaustion rolls across their face after reaching their table and realising that they have forgotten to take a stirrer from the dustings bar, and, knowing that they must now cross the length of the café to fetch one (in front of everyone else who has just watched them pimp their beverage with assorted peripherals at the very bar they must now return to), the signal they provide that they themselves find their return just as annoying as it must appear untoward or amusing to the other patrons.

  This tutting, eye-rolling signal is related to the gesture we might make on the street after realising that we are walking in the wrong direction from that where we wish to head. Wanting to turn round but fearing the attention we will attract by breaking rank and turning one-hundred-and-eighty degrees for no clear reason, we decide to use a cartoon-gesture that denotes ‘Having Forgotten Something’: we raise a forefinger slightly to make a minimal ‘A-ha!’ point, raise our eyebrows, stop in our tracks and provide a visible motivation for the very public rotation we are about to perform. ‘Look,’ we imagine people will think, ‘that guy has realised he has forgotten something; how sensible that he should now turn round and attend to it. What sound judgement on his part.’ If we were alone, we would not make that cartoon-gesture of sudden remembrance.

  I like to catch myself and others acting out such brief self-conscious thought processes because they remind me of what I have come to think of as ‘In a Play’ moments: reliable actions one encounters only in actors on stage and never in the real life they are failing at that moment to depict convincingly. Here are some ‘In a Play’ moments I have mentally collected:

  Sitting like a king in a play

  Kings in Shakespeare relax back in their chairs and slouch to one side, allowing the hand on the side to which they are leaning to be comfortably raised to the face for beard-stroking or waving things away.

  Sitting like a prince in a play

  A prince, on the other hand, sits jauntily forward in the chair, legs spryly and widely apart, leaning to one side as if telling an imagined neighbour something in confidence, with an elbow resting dashingly on the knee towards the side he is leaning.

  Entering a room for the first time in a play

  Here, one should clearly look at each of the walls and especially the imagined ceiling, twisting the head up and round to take in the whole of the space with a gentle, wide-eyed display of wonder.

  Approaching a lover in a play

  Lovers approaching each other, especially if singing, should lean back a little and extend both arms forward at an angle of forty-five degrees to the floor, with hands extended. The lady’s palms should be facing down, the man’s up, so that when they meet they can clasp their hands together in one bundle, bring them up to the centre of the chest and gaze unconvincingly into each other’s eyes.

  Looking at something far away in a play

  When checking if one can see a person or thing that is so far away that it resides well off-stage, the sense of distance is magically created by looking into the wings and stepping up on to the ball of the forward foot as if one were looking over a fence that was a little higher than one’s eye-level.

  Telling a story in a play

  When person A describes an event to person B, both A and B should face forward so that A can move his hand to paint a picture in the air and B can follow that hand in order to build the same mental picture for himself. B should be engrossed in the gestures made by A, and if at any point A wishes to ensure that B is entirely infected with his own enthusiasm for the tale, A can simply bat B on the chest with the back of his hand. I have to say that while I have never known human beings to communicate in this way, or in any that resembles it, this is both one of the most bizarre and yet blindly accepted ‘In a Play’ moments of which I am aware.

  Flirting in a play

  If you are a lady wishing to secure the attention of a handsome but shy male, a surefire route is to clasp your hands behind your back and walk round him in that coquettish, pointy-toed, one-foot-directly-in-front-of-the-other, shoulder-swinging style that handsome but shy men read as sexually attractive (as opposed to a sign of mental illness). If this fails, laugh a lot over your shoulder, pull at his tie a little or do walky-fingers up the front of his shirt before laughing again and running off. No handsome but shy male should be able to resist.

  Delivering sexual innuendos in a play

  An audience at a Shakespeare play are not usually a clever lot, so it is best to clarify any sexual double-entendre in a line by thrusting the right forearm into the air (like a phallus) while gripping the bicep with the left hand. Characters who use sexual innuendo are usually fun-loving and spirited, and tend to say things that are ‘tongue-in-cheek’. This can be clarified by actually poking the tongue clearly into the cheek just after a line has been delivered.

  Experiencing loss of a loved one in Shakespeare’s time in a play

  Sixteenth-century ladies would always place one forearm across the stomach and bend forward, extending the other arm before them in the gesture of ‘I’m trying to reach but simultaneously stopping myself with my own arm’ that we so commonly associate with loss.

  Noticing people when wandering outdoors in a play

  When approaching people on a beach or in a forest, do not notice them until you are close enough to be seen on stage yourself. Even though you would have seen them from miles off, it is best to save being startled by their presence until very close.

  Being a lady working in a guest-house in a play

  By the end of the day you have had enough of hard work and time-wasters, so it would be correct to slam a pitcher down on the table and sigh loudly into an uncomfortably lopsided both-hands-on-hips position to let us know that. If you are particularly salt-of-the-earth, you can certainly take the towel used for wiping the table clean and throw it heartily over the shoulder, before standing like that to show your rustic exhaustion, just like in real life.

  Squaring the cards in my hands, and then rotating the deck to enjoy the cool texture of their flush edges, I scanned the wide sweep of the restaurant interior to locate a table appropriate to approach. A f
resh wave of reluctance twisted through my gut at the thought of interrupting happily chatting groups or risking a dead atmosphere at a quiet table. In the restaurant’s toilet I had assembled a few magical aids among and under my clothing that I would use later in the evening. It was a comfort to think that all over the world, close-up magicians at the top of their game had to find moments to lock themselves in cubicles and sort out their pockets while peering into a toilet bowl. This is the wonderful, sad human reality behind the mystery of much of magic. The hobbyist conjuror who suddenly produces a bottle of champagne from a handkerchief for his friends has been carrying that bottle around all evening, cold and wet and heavy against his thigh, and while keeping up a pretence of conversation has been thinking of little other than when there might be a suitable moment to do his trick and rid himself of the weight that pulls him down on one side. For the professional and the amateur, the toilet cubicle is the only place to hide, perhaps several times an evening, to ensure that the more fiddly tricks are all set up. Given that some tricks demand apparatus to be worn under the clothes, it is a common and humbling thing to be stood in the disabled toilet/storage-room, velvet trousers around one’s ankles, trying to feed near-invisible thread into some hidden mechanism for the eighth time, angry and impatient; and easy to understand why magicians tend to pretend to be more important than they really are.

  And for now I had to pretend. By holding the deck with pressure from my right thumb and ring-finger at diagonally opposed corners and my forefinger curled on top, I sprang the cards into my left palm and stepped out of the gloom to begin a stroll around the restaurant floor – a promenade designed to achieve two separate but important aims:

  1. Draw attention to myself as a magician.

  2. Stall.

  I could meander like this, building up the courage to approach a table, for a very long time.

  The restaurant, converted from one of the many warehouses around the dock area of Bristol, was stylishly decorated with a North African theme: a grey flagstone floor and warm, rough, orange walls formed a backdrop to Byzantine fixtures and heavy stone-topped tables covered with white cloths. It combined the grand visual splendour appropriate for a restaurant of its calibre with the ethnic affectation adopted by the white middle classes who were evidently feeling guilty about being white and middle class during the nineties.* As an undergraduate at that time, I had seen the first ‘ethnic’ trinkets appear in student shops in Bristol, and start to spread and flourish as art students with stupid hats and impressionist postcards looked to decorate their rooms and find places to stash their stash and stick their sticks of heady incense. Soon, stalls dedicated to naively fashioned fish and boxes made of fret-worked dark wood and brass filled the harbour walkways and offered all ages of arty, velvety people a hand-carved opportunity to create a Moroccan souk in their own rented accommodation. I, being such a person, bought these things enthusiastically; I even asked my Aunty Jan, visiting for the day, to buy me a large, colourful wooden fish for my twenty-first birthday present. Now, a couple of decades later, the fringe appeal has dwindled and ‘ethnic’ is the received term for a style of interior decor available at John Lewis for home delivery. And how charming to imagine those impoverished workers making cabinets and towers for our extensive DVD and CD collections – really quite touching.

  I had begun my card-springing/strolling action by the bar; now I allowed it to take me in between the babbling, noisy tables. I looked for signs of friendliness and of possible hostility from the guests sipping at their brandies and coffees. This was a preferable set-up to working tables when people were having a full dinner: the team behind the restaurant had, thankfully, decided to restrict entertainment to the relaxed ground floor, and offer an uninterrupted main course and dessert upstairs.

  Understandably, responses to a magician can be hostile. I am tempted to think that the responsibility for this should generally lie with the magician in question, but clearly, when an entertainer at your table is far from what you were hoping for during a romantic meal out, you’d be justifiably surprised to be bothered even if the performer was rather good. Once, and only once, I performed a card trick that involved a card disappearing from the deck and appearing in a lady’s zipped-up handbag under her chair. The woman in question, far from being enchanted by the impossibility, immediately accused me of having had my hand in her bag without her consent. There was no answer to this, certainly no way of pretending that I had not violated that privacy, despite the fact that the bag appeared to have been inaccessible to me. Furthermore, the same witless witch then decided that twenty pounds had gone missing from her purse (the purse, of course, had been kept in the bag), and insisted to the restaurant that I had stolen it. All this on the first night I had been booked to appear in that particular restaurant. The second week at the restaurant brought a customer complaining that I had damaged his watch during a trick in which I had caused it to stop on command. This was a more likely assertion. It was a miserable start.

  Quite commonly, a man dining with women will respond with hostility to a magician’s approach, as the latter is seen as a threat to the former’s role as alpha male of his group. This will be the man who interrupts the magic with sarcastic comments, until eventually shushed into submission by his friends, which makes him sulk. Sat back, arms folded, refusing to be impressed, he becomes the child of the group and must be handled as one. The most professional response by the magician is to direct the performance to make this individual look good: this man can be made to correctly divine cards against all odds, and the magician can position himself as a clear non-threat. My own response was rarely as honourable. I would compliment him on his jacket and steal his wallet while making a point of feeling the cloth. On a good day I would return to the table and purposefully lose a bet to this same customer, and while he gloated I’d hand him his winnings, which he did not know had come from his own wallet. He might not search for his wallet to put the money away for some time, and the longer it took before he realised I must have it, the better. On a bad day, if the individual in question was just intolerable, I would silently drag his wallet under the table across a very powerful magnet I had strapped to my knee for other purposes and in doing so wipe all his credit cards, before returning the wallet with its useless plastic invisibly to his pocket.

  A still unwelcome though well-meant response from a family is to have the adults turn to their child and say, ‘Look, a magician!’ Children’s magicians form a thankless band of their own in the world of magic, and unless he is a brightly jacketed, horn-carrying member of that dedicated rank and file, and has so far managed to circumvent police arrest, the chances of a magician being able to competently perform anything for a child are minimal. Children are the worst audience for grownup conjuring: the knowledge of interpersonal psychology held by the performer which is so important for the success of the tricks is wasted upon the very young, who have not learnt to respond automatically to social cues. Relax and ask an adult a question during a trick and he will look you in the eye; do the same with a child and he would have no compunction about ignoring the query and grabbing the props from your hand to inspect them.

  In the same way that the diners, some of whom were now looking over at me, were making snap (and, I always presumed, somewhat unfavourable) judgements about me, I was engaged in similar acts of societal pigeonholing as I decided whom I should approach. We have evolved enormously efficient ways of telling if a person is a threat to us or to our group, and each time I approached a table I was on the receiving end of this human ability that we have honed over hundreds of thousands of years, and had to make sure that I radiated only signs of friendliness. But equally my own need was to see whether a particular table would be a welcoming or threatening place, so I too became hyper-aware of relevant signals and learnt to make quick judgements to protect myself. In constantly sizing people up, I was of course necessarily reducing them to stereotypes. Friendly young couples were a happy bet, and always a relief to find
. Corporate parties, easy enough to spot, were generally good value until the combination of excess alcohol and their lack of awareness of anyone else in the restaurant made them unbearable to be around.

  There is something I find strangely reassuring in our ability to quickly assess people and form snap judgements about them (accurate or otherwise), for it allows us to know that we are just as susceptible to instant classification ourselves. Rather than see this as insulting stereotyping, I like the fact it can make our own worries seem much smaller from the outside, indeed sometimes no more than predictable symptoms of the cliché that we present to the world through our choices of clothes and language and posture. The overbearing mother who expresses her unnecessary concern over aspects of her children’s lives would do well to hear how she sounds to her average listener, and could take comfort in appreciating the unnecessarily high level of her anxiety. The ease with which we can usually offer productive advice to worried people (precisely because we draw simple conclusions about their troubles) is usually masked by our empathic noises and desire to appear sensitive, and the worrier is sometimes denied a possibly very helpful chance to see her problem as much smaller and simpler. In the same way that the old school photograph shows us how ludicrous our all-encompassing concerns were at that age, the knowledge that we are the only ones to take our tribulations so seriously and that the rest of the world would find our little anxieties silly if we spoke them out loud, is to me at least a relief. As much as we all believe we are far more fascinating than we at first – or perhaps ever – appear, I like to hang on to the idea that I might present something of a banal stereotype to those I meet, and am happy to receive from others more perspicacious opinions about my life than I can provide myself.* This is why I find it comforting to visit my parents in my childhood home and be struck by the fact that the shelves in the living room are much smaller and lower than I remember them as a child. Time passes, and the concerns of the moment will make us smile further down the road.