Derren Brown turns into Nostradamus – and I predict you’ll submit to one gasp-inducing stunt after another

Do we have free will – or are the words I am about to write, the four stars twinkling atop this review, pre-ordained? That’s the stuff Derren Brown conjures with in his new show Only Human, which takes its inspiration from Nostradamus’s ability to foresee the future. Nostradamus used divination techniques – and so Brown engineers a stunt in which his audience, en masse, dowse a waterway in the building next door. Nostradamus had a near-death experience – and so, in one remarkable sequence, Brown orchestrates something similar for a hypnotised member of his crowd.

This of course is territory Brown has always made his own: strip away the free will rhetoric and Nostradamus folderol, and artful dodger Derren stands revealed, doing the same mentalism and mesmerism tricks as ever. By the interval (and acknowledging that we’ve been spoiled by his jaw-dropping back catalogue), this current collection of stunts doesn’t feel all that high-powered. Predicting an audience member’s yes/no answers to a series of questions is amazing, yes, but low stakes. And that water divination set-piece misfires: only one of his three selected dowsers is up to the task, and the venue’s seating is too cramped for the mass mobility the routine requires.

Act two raises the bar. First there’s a routine which – not to give anything away – is extraordinary and disconcerting in equal measure. The all-enveloping theatrics of the sequence (video, booming sound, whiplash set changes) are so giddying, one loses sight of the point it’s trying to prove. But there’s no denying it gives the gig lift-off, into a stratosphere of one gasp-inducing stunt after another. There’s a mind-reading number involving photos that audience members submit at the interval, followed by a reveal showing how prophecies made in the show’s first half have now, quite impossibly, been fulfilled.

You can grasp at explanations for that, or for the closing coup involving a bowl of Smarties and a 16th-century augury. Or – we have no free will, after all – you can submit to Brown’s powers and be astonished.