If you fancy a change from the usual stand-up fare, book up quickly for Chris Cox’s hugely entertaining Control Freak – last year he sold out early on. It’s not quite comedy or magic, but a mongrel hybrid of both, featuring mind-reading tricks in the style of Derren Brown. Cox moves with a manic energy, presumably to distract you from all the subliminal messaging going on; there’s plenty of audience participation, and the fact that not every trick comes off as slickly as it might is all the more convincing, as the outcome is always close enough to what was predicted to reassure the audience that his techniques really do work. The grand finale is a short film, apparently locked away from the beginning of the show, and if I tell you any more it would spoil the impact, but you will spend the rest of the festival trying to work out how he did it.

When it comes to tricks of the mind, we’ve all been spoiled by the jaw-dropping shenanigans of Derren Brown, setting expectations almost impossibly high. Those simpler days when audiences would have been happy to see a goateed weirdo in a cape guessing the number some stooge was thinking of have thankfully long gone.

Chris Cox brings youth and vigour to the genre, and his finale – if all is as it appears – is properly impressive. The cynic, however, may still suspect some technical or sleight-of-hand jiggery-pokery in his act, despite all his assurances.

He bills himself as the mind-reader who can’t read minds, admitting to what everyone pretty much knew anyway; that such displays are a mixture of psychology, neurolinguistic programming, magic tricks and the ability to read body language. It’s the magic trick aspect that’s cause for scepticism, though, as the inquisitive will spend as much time wondering how he did something as being impressed that he did it at all.

Such disbelief is only testament to the fact that his demonstrations are so remarkable you are left thinking that he couldn’t possibly have done them without cheating. But suspend your disbelief, and you’ll be gobsmacked.

Cox is a sprightly performer, animatedly and mischievously interacting with the audience, cheekily playing on their reluctance to get involved, even though such participation is clearly a vital element of a show like this. Some of the jokes, to be honest, are fairly ropey, but he’s not pretending to be a comedian.

He opens with an astonishing display of prophecy using a volunteer and the Fringe programme, and goes on to successfully determine all manner of seemingly unpredictable occurrences. Unusually, he gets the audience to do much of the work, too, collectively guessing a mobile phone number or selecting the right key to open a box. The tricks are made more impressive from this reversal, though Cox often subverts the result with a little joke.

Some tasks require a fair bit of preamble, but he keeps things lively, and the payoffs are worth the set-ups. And as he builds to his show-stopper, demonstrating that he guessed a complex series of events determined by various audience members long before he took to the stage, the pace builds up nicely.

Cox might not quite be Derren Brown – yet. But you don’t have to be able to see into the future to predict a good future for him.

Reviewed by: Steve Bennett

Chris Cox: Control Freak
I’m a sucker for magic and mind reading and all that nonsense, and that’s exactly the kind of nonsense you’ll find here. Though if you don’t want to have your mind played with you’ll need to use said mind very carefully to will the random audience selection process to not randomly select you. I did just that last year and it worked. Which is just as well. If he had selected me I’d have said “Brad Pitt” too, and looked like a gullible easily–led fool.