A mentalist magician in the making since his early teens, Mark Guest was inspired by 1980s TV star Paul Daniels and contacted the hard-working millionaire who advised him to “Read a ton of books”. A tall order for the dyslexic Guest, but he made his grades and kept the magic going while succeeding at corporate marketing, where his uncanny room-reading and name-remembering abilities must have been incredibly useful.

He decided to shift focus after one of his closest friends, who’d always enjoyed Guest’s informal magic performances, was stricken by cancer. Jaded by corporate work – “Life’s too short: enough of the TLAs!” (Three Letter Acronyms) – Guest began realising his dream of becoming a full-time showman. Using his considerable expertise, and drawing on his wide social network, built up over many years, he’s starting to attract sizeable crowds at pub and club venues.

People skills are clearly Guest’s forte: charming, engaging and enthusiastic, it’s easy to imagine him as a motivational speaker. He’s also clearly trying to break new ground and tear up the magic show rule book: “They told me never to ask someone up on stage right at the start… to read more than two minds at once… to end with a card trick.”

Accordingly, Guest does all three, to produce a very interactive, personal show that works well across age groups from teens upwards. There are plenty of youngsters among the venerable reviewers in his packed press night at Calder’s Bookshop, which ensures a lively evening.

Anticipating PIN-stealing / secret revealing-type anxieties, Guest reassures from the outset, promising not to belittle or embarrass anyone – “That’s old-fashioned” – and revealing some of his techniques. Having asked audience members to imagine a large predatory beast, he points out that they’ve mostly chosen tigers because he’s been playing big cat-themed songs at them for the past ten minutes. Although this rather begs the question: was there also subliminal messaging amid the tunes? Has the audience been pre-loaded with everything that follows? This sort of query is inevitable, but Guest prevails on the crowd to just go with the flow, enjoy the banter and experience the astonishment, or, in short: “Sit back, dream, smile, believe.”

Overall, his act is fairly reminiscent of Paul Daniel’s, who used twinkly good humour and videos shot before shows to make predictions. Guest brings the show into the modern era by his use of mobile phones: he has the crowd doing numerological calculations on them and calls an unsuspecting outsider using an audience-generated U.K. mobile number. This is interesting and fertile ground, now that phones are extensions of human minds, and perhaps Guest should feature them even more.

While his ability at determining numbers, places and words randomly chosen by audience members is extraordinary, it does become a little repetitive. This is alleviated with jokes, life stories and links to other tricks with callbacks, but ideally, there should be more of these, and extra buildup. Maybe in a show longer than an hour Guest could also try applying an overarching narrative to the tricks and relating them all at the end.

Things occasionally do go awry – Guest has to prevaricate a few times when he can’t quite grasp someone’s thought, and a random phone call is received with a recorded message – but he’s very good at quipping, glossing over and moving on. It might be funnier, and a little less unnerving, if he went wrong more often – a bit of the Tommy Cooper? – to avoid making his eerily accurate guesses look too easy. But perhaps it wouldn’t be true to the Guest persona: far more slick than clumsy.

Now that Daniels-style magic is a fading memory to older generations, and completely unknown to almost everyone under 40 (they’re more likely to know Daniels’ wife Debbie McGee from Strictly), this could be a very good time for Guest to step forward. And his ‘Magic with a mission’, raising money for cancer charities, is highly commendable.

He’s likeable and entertaining: a nice guy that’s fun to spend time with. Clearly, his Instagram following is fond of him, and there’s real potential here for development. With just a little added spectacle, comedy and storytelling, Guest’s show could be even more complex and satisfying, with appeal to a much wider audience.

 Reviewed on 29 September and continues to tour

The Reviews Hub Star Rating

80%

Astounding mind-reading magic