DERREN BROWN: ONLY HUMAN
Apollo Theatre
★★★½
“Brown commands the entire room, and all of the people in it”
Among the great pleasures of an evening with Derren Brown is sitting in the dark listening to the sounds of a thousand people in the auditorium being drawn in and then taken apart. Behind me last night, there were gasps and murmurs of “oh no” in perfect unison, while at one point a member of the audience, prompted by a forewarning from Brown, got up and left.
He himself, of course, from curtain up – with a silly illusion that I doubt fooled anyone – had been preparing us for exactly this moment. Brown, director/co-writer Andrew O’Connor and co-writer Stephen Long are masters at this – slowly pulling us in and allowing our minds to progress from cynicism to awe. The volunteers and audience are their instruments, with Brown the conductor of the orchestra. The whole is a virtuoso performance.
What makes Brown so special is his connection and warmth. He gives the impression of vulnerability rather than cleverness, and he draws his volunteers in gently to become collaborators rather than subjects. The two or three chosen from the stalls played their parts with real conviction. My more suspicious companion declared roundly at the interval that the whole show depended on plants. Absolutely not, I countered: that underrates his skill with people. The ease and spontaneity are the performance. By the evening’s end, even she was persuaded. Which of us was right?.
The stagecraft deserves huge credit. Simon Higlett’s set, Simon Wainwright’s video and Charlie Morgan Jones’s lighting give the evening a scale and drama that goes well beyond a man and a microphone, and the live camerawork both on stage and in the stalls is used with professional confidence. As the illusions weave together towards the finale, we are all left astonished.
Where the evening faltered for me was in its shape. My attention drifted at points, and the execution of the story as a whole felt somewhat bumpy, with seams showing between one section and the next. It is possible that some of that roughness is part of the craft, since a show built on misdirection can’t afford to run too smoothly. The link to the title also seemed tenuous. Only Human promises an exploration of what we are, and what arrives is more a string of brilliant set pieces than an argument.
And yet the thing he does best, he does extraordinarily well. Brown commands the entire room, and all of the people in it. The handling of the crowd is simply magic to watch.
DERREN BROWN: ONLY HUMAN
Apollo Theatre
Reviewed 21st October 2026
by Louise Sibley
Photography by Pamela Raith
