On the Afternoon of the 8th June 2024 I attended a matinee performance of a show called ‘Mind Mangler’. This show was a preview show of a new piece of work by the creative and frankly hilarious minds at Mischief. These are the people who brought us ‘The Play That Goes Wrong’ and ‘Peter Pan Goes Wrong’, as well as the TV Shows (that go wrong) series. Mind Mangler is about a magician/illusionist who’s membership to the Magic Circle has become lost in the post, instead he’s a member of the Tragic Circle… As with all Mischief performances, you can never really tell when it’s actually started as it’s usually going on within the audience well before the lights dim and the show starts. This has you thinking, what is part of it, and what is not.. and it’s always fun to see people’s reactions when they realise that not everything around them is entirely what it seems.

The play was really a two man show with the lead played by Henry Lewis and this Stooge played by Jonathan Sayer. Henry and Jonathan of course are Co-Creative Directors who founded the Mischief Theatre company in 2008 when they were all students studying at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art in West London. The company is mostly known for their continued portrail of the fictional amature dramatic society, the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society as it attempts to perform various plays over the years.

We had the seats with the extra legroom, thankfully as this was a ‘Preview’ show, the prices were all reasonably set so we were able to secure these seats. We lost a little bit of the stage on the left side, but I don’t think any action happened there anyway.

The show itself written by Henry Lewis was fantastic to watch. It was funny throughout with some really fast acted and cued scene’s throughout. There was a lot of audience participation.. Some of it staged and some not so staged.. I was even involved in some myself… A bit was using a ‘device’ which could read people’s minds in which Lewis’s character would head off stage and into the audience to read the minds of audience members. The two people to my left, when their minds were read they were two French teachers thinking about getting involved with each other, and my ‘Thought’ was ‘Bonjour’ which in the context of the joke got a huge reaction from the audience. – All of this off-stage action was filmed live by a ‘cast member’ using what looked like a go-pro on a handheld gimbal! So I ended up on that screen briefly with the audience laughing at me.. It was incredibly funny at the time.

I think this show was a good performance from the Mischief Comedy Theatre group and another stunning show of how they all work together as this style of ‘Goes Wrong’ is adaptable and simply works in many different situations. I would go see this again, just like I’d see The Play That Goes wrong multiple times too. I really must watch the TV Show / Plays series I picked up after seeing Peter Pan Goes Wrong.

I’d recommend Mind Mangler to anybody.. It’s an adult show but older children would get a kick out of it too as long as they are with a parent or guardian.