Robert Haley does not claim to be a mind reader apparently, in spite of the title. His techniques descend from those that the Delphic Oracle used instead. Haley’s performance moves through acts involving a deck of cards, words, memory, energy and questions from the audience with a startling degree of accuracy. It turns out that he is very helpful in the location of lost wallets.

Don’t think that by sitting in the middle of the audience you are safe from interaction, as in this demonstration the audience is the show. Wednesday night’s audience are quite receptive to this and are even diving out of their seats in a bid to be involved.

The mentalist is very eager to impress upon the audience that he is here to entertain, not humiliate and indeed you are more in danger of being smacked in the face by a paper plate than you are of having your sexual proclivities revealed.

In the beginning it seems that Haley’s performance is more to do with reading faces, and minute reactions, than minds but as the hour progresses he shows a fascinating array of memory and energy tricks.

Haley seems slightly apprehensive at times, and the transitions between the acts are not the smoothest. However this makes him seem more genuine than the polished car salesman type of presentation would have done.

Involvement from the lighting box adds an extra layer of innuendo to the show but I am unsure if this will be a feature of every performance.

The mentalist must have used his mind reading powers to discover which member of the audience was the reviewer in order to them butter up. Based on the vibes I place on a piece of cardboard he decides I am a sophisticated person who moves through social circles easily. I’ll leave it to others to decide on the accuracy of this statement.  

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Robert Haley is not psychic, nor does he pretend to be. He can’t actually ‘read your mind’. He is a mentalist. He can figure out what you are thinking or picturing from all those little smirks, and twitches you don’t even realise you are making. 

Something about the publicity material for this show made me, and many people I’ve spoken to, think that Haley is a comedian or an actor, pretending to be a mind reader; but that actually the joke is that we know he’s not; that we just suspend our disbelief in the name of comedy. That is not what it is at all. Robert Haley is not a comedian (though he will get you laughing). He is a young man who is incredibly good at skills that a lot of us would like to claim: picking up on non-verbal human responses and reactions.

Haley doesn’t hide his tricks behind flashy lights, sequins and velvet curtains. His honesty about his memorising process and reading of people’s faces (though he doesn’t let on how he pulls off some of the seemingly more complex tricks) and his friendly un-showy manner made me trust and relate to him, which, in turn, left me more in wonder than I might have been, had the show, and Haley, not been so very real and genuine.

Mind Reader is well structured, building up from basic card tricks and memory games to leaving us completely bewildered right before the interval, followed by an astounding second act: Haley’s version of a mentalist act of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that was then called a psychic demonstration.

In this part of the show, Haley picks sealed envelopes, which contain questions the audience has written earlier, out of a bowl, and with only the writer’s initials on the outside of the envelope as a clue, he tells us who has written the question and what it is was, or something very close.

The thing that impressed me here, most of all, was that Haley was up on the stage under lights, and although they lowered these and brought the audience lights up a bit, we were still mostly in the darkness and reasonably far away… so it really does seem as though he is able to sense from the envelope in his hand, rather than the person quite far away from him and in the dark. Who knows…

Although I think I could figure out how he did most of his tricks (not that I could reproduce them) there are some moments that left me completely stumped. Maybe Robert Haley is a mind reader after all.

If you want to be impressed this Fringe, and see something refreshing, exciting and … maybe actually magic, go along. 
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