On Sunday 5th September the club was treated to one of the meeting highlights of the year with the long awaited John Archer lecture. John is currently the Magic Circle’s stage Magician of the year and is renowned throughout the magic fraternity for his comedy approach to mentalism.
With a packed audience including many visiting guests from other societies, John kicked off the lecture with his take on Hoy’s Tossed Out Deck. In his version he uses a deck switch to ensure that his audience is convinced that the pack in use is genuine and normal. A nice touch involved the selected audience members being asked to turn their back on John so that they could visualise their cards more easily on the back wall. This of course made the reveal of their selections much more convincing for the rest of the audience.
Throughout the lecture, John made use of Spider tables with a servante which allowed him to perform various neat ditches and switches – a useful demonstration of how useful this can be in performance.
Other effects performed and explained included a nice routine involving 4 audience members, each writing a 4 digit number on a plain postcard, with John divining who had written each number. This was the first time he had included this item in his lecture - Luke Jermay had contributed to its design, and as Luke was at the meeting it seemed fitting for it to be tried out. A very nice method was involved which I’m sure many will be trying out.
Another routine involved an audience member thinking of a random 5 or 6 digit word and John trying to read their mind in order to identify the word. After some hilarious byplay involving John getting the word entirely wrong, it turned up as a prediction written on a card inside a sealed envelope which was found in his wallet.
We also were treated to John’s take on the magic square which demonstrated how entertaining (and easy!) this well known routine can be when presented to best effect.
His Chinese Choice effect, available either from John direct or via Alakazam, uses numbered cards to predict both the price of a Chinese meal and the item number on a Chinese restaurant menu, which both of course match after some fair looking card shuffling by 3 audience members.
And of course Collard, John’s great version of the Koran medallion effect was saved for the climax to what had been a brilliant lecture enjoyed immensely by everyone who attended.
John has a refreshing take on how some effects can be improved by building in automatic misdirection, and by justifying parts of a trick with a story or other device so that everything makes more sense to an audience. In a lot of cases it’s clear he has altered effects to suit his own style and make them more audience friendly, and that’s no doubt one of the reasons why he is so successful and also attracts big lecture audiences wherever he goes. And that’s something we can all learn from!
All John’s marketed effects, including the relatively new ‘Streetwise’ book test involving a London A to Z, are available from his website direct (www.john-archer.com) or from Alakazam – although as John pointed out, products purchased directly from him are slightly cheaper.
