'Derren Brown: Only Human' review — a truly astonishing performance from the master showman

Read our review of Derren Brown: Only Human, now in performances at the Apollo Theatre to 30 January 2027.

Summary

• Derren Brown brings his show Only Human to the Apollo Theatre
• The maverick entertainer uses incredible audience participation

You may well regard the world with a renewed sense of disbelief upon exiting Only Human, the latest solo show – the audience are his castmates – from the superhuman mind of that maverick entertainer, Derren Brown.

Custom dictates that lips remain sealed as to the specifics of his latest offering, which has come to rest in the West End, after a UK tour, at the same venue where Brown brought Showman nearly four years ago. (In between came Unbelievable, which included the likes of Brown’s Shaftesbury Avenue neighbour, Oliver!’s Simon Lipkin, amongst its eclectic cast.) That adjective informs more or less every moment of a nearly three-hour show (some trimming wouldn’t go amiss) that conjoins meditations on free will and human suggestibility with a quick history lesson regarding that 16th-century master of all prognosticators, Nostradamus.

And so we get set pieces of varying degrees of complexity that take in all levels of the Apollo Theatre and, in the second act, deployed one member of the audience in a degree of audience participation I’ve never previously experienced in a playhouse. One assumes Brown’s onstage accomplices, so to speak, opt into the experience out of their own free will, and the few I spoke to afterwards looked charged up by what they had experienced - if still processing what precisely had happened. Andrew O'Connor, the director, has shaped the sequence of routines, such as they are, in the absence of Brown's longtime collaborator, Andy Nyman (late of The Producers).

I looked on from the safety of my stalls seat, wondering not for the first time how Brown arrives at the knowledge he does: what are the chances of information scrawled on an overturned piece of paper tallying directly with the biographical data – or hoped-for career choices – of a random member of his public? This show more than his others likes to move the audience around, and Brown is careful never to render anyone uncomfortable: Dame Edna he is not.

Indeed, age 55, Brown on this occasion is comparatively indrawn about himself, at least as compared to Showman, which riffed on COVID and the death of his father. You glimpse him briefly in class age 13 but there's not much sense of what makes this gay man in middle age tick. That said, he’s not above a cheerful jab at the competition next door (Hadestown is “not as good” as his own show, Brown lets slip in passing), and he’s right to point to the way in which our attitudes change with time toward such essential matters as what we might like to be in life.

I admit to shivering somewhat at a skill set whereby Brown seems to know more about people than they may know about themselves: what kind of shaman precisely is he? In the domestic arena, is he capable of small talk? Still, what matters here is this showman's ability to corral a crowd who were clucking seemingly as one about the amazement of it all as we made for the exit. For myself, I’m on alert these days for a black-and-white dress and a baseball cap.

Why might that be? Don’t ask. You’ll find out (or maybe not) soon enough.

Derren Brown: Only Human is at the Apollo Theatre to 30 January 2027. Book Derren Brown: Only Human tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Derren Brown: Only Human (Photos by Pamela Raith)