E-Club ProThe Comedy Zone
The Amazing Mysterio
The bright yellow posters had been seen around the town for the past week. On them, printed in big green block letters, were the spine tinglingly exciting words "The Amazing Mysterio - The World's Greatest Magician". I'd heard of David Copperfield, who I reckoned was pretty nifty, and then there was that David Blaine bloke who seemed crazy but who did some pretty cool magic stuff, but The Amazing Mysterio was a new one on me. However, the poster said he was the World's Greatest Magician so I guessed he must be.
I was met at the door of the Belchington Memorial Hall (founded 1921) by a large woman who seemed to be wearing a dress constructed entirely from reject material normally used to make Punch and Judy booths, and I hoped that at least some of the £2.50 entry fee that I paid her would enable her to revisit a clothes shop without too much delay. I glanced around at the 12 rows of brown metal framed seats which were neatly arranged in straight rows in front of the stage and tried to spot one which still had all of its canvas seat material in tact. There were one or two suitable ones, and I elected to sit on one in the centre of the front row, despite the presence of a suspicious dark stain on it. At least the stain was dry.
I peered at my watch. 10 minutes until the show was due to start. I glanced around at the other spectators who were already in their places. A harassed looking woman was trying unsuccessfully to control four small boys who were running round her seat trying to hit each other with several Big Eat bags of crisps. A solitary man was sitting at the back fiddling mindlessly with a pack of cards, while two rows in front of him a teenage boy and girl had obviously decided that the Memorial Hall was a warmer place to kiss than their usual haunt of the local bus shelter. Further along the front row from me was an old couple who appeared to be discussing magicians from the past. "I always liked that David Niven - he was a good magician. And what about that other chap on the telly, what was his name, Chan Alabaster?"
Mrs. Punch and Judy dress had now abandoned her post on the door and was working her way around the room closing the curtains at all the windows. Either she was trying to create an atmospheric blackout, or she was concerned hoards of people might try to catch a glimpse of The World's Greatest Magician through the window without paying. Actually, she needn't have bothered since the last time the windows had been cleaned was when the local parish council mistakenly thought the Queen was going to visit on the occasion of her Silver Jubilee in the 1970's, so no one would be able to see through them anyway.
Suddenly there was a loud click followed by a humming sound. Then we were treated to an unexpectedly entertaining few moments in which the Amazing Mysterio coughed and swore repeatedly as he attempted to set up his microphone. After an enormous amount of scrabbling and scraping, silence was suddenly restored, which either meant that the microphone was now successfully installed and then switched off, or that he had given up the uneven struggle with technology and had opted instead to revert to the well established theatrical technique of voice projection or in layman's terms 'shouting'.
With a surprising swiftness, Mrs. Punch and Judy dress suddenly wafted past me and approaching the front of the stage, grabbed the lower edges of one half of the tasteful green, purple and mould coloured curtain and started to drag it open with a series of wild and at times desperate pulls. Swish curtains obviously hadn't been invented when the Memorial Hall was fitted out, and so the best she could achieve after several minutes of furious activity was to drag the left curtain two thirds open and the right one half open. Judging by the view afforded to us through this narrower than expected portal, it was perhaps just as well, since The Amazing Mysterio had obviously been caught slightly unawares and only just had time to finish doing up his belt.
Seeing that his audience now awaited him, our Illustrious Illusionist lurched into action. His opening sequence was a bewildering cavalcade of magical happenings. Unfortunately none of these happenings seemed to bear any relation to any of the others, so at the end of a frantic five minutes in which he had pulled endless amounts of coloured handkerchieves of all different sizes from an absolutely gigantic circular piece of tubing, (which for all the world looked like a section from a sewage pipe which had been covered in red and gold patterned wallpaper), and which had culminated in the less than spectacular final production of an umbrella, the type of which is normally found stuck in the top of exotic drinks, we were all left bemused rather than amazed. A shaky start perhaps but I just knew that it would get better.
I was wrong.
The Cataclysmic Conjuror now retreated to the very rear of the platform area where the stage lighting, which consisted of one 40W light bulb, ensured that we could neither see him nor what he was doing. As I strained my eyes in an attempt to pick out some sort of activity in the murky gloom, I thought I spotted a large silver sphere rise from a table to a heady height of about 6 inches, where it then proceeded to sway dangerously from side to side for a few moments while Mysterio waved one hand in a slightly demented way above and below it, before it rapidly descended, clearly unexpectedly, to the table top which it hit with an alarming thud. Not quite sure what that was all about but I suspected that some repairs to the prop would be required before that one could be attempted again.
Our Wonder Worker now decided that there was no reason for him to suffer up on stage all on his own, and so he indicated that he wanted someone to come up to assist him. Shielding his eyes with his hand in order to keep out the blinding glare form the 40W bulb above his head, he started to look with obvious gathering desperation around the small and hardly select group of misfits which made up his audience. Spotting the elderly couple sitting on the end of my row, he pointed at the lady and bellowed at her to get out of her seat and come up on stage.
Slowly she rose from her position and leaving her walking stick with her husband she shuffled towards the front of the stage. It was only at this point that it became obvious that the portable stairs normally used to allow access to the stage from the front had not been dragged from the hall store cupboard by Sidney Tremlett, the caretaker, and so we were treated to the rather unedifying sight of the old lady being dragged and pushed up and over the edge of the stage so that she arrived in a crumpled heap at Mysterio's feet. I didn't realise that anyone still wore bloomers like that.
Concerned that the pace of his show would be interrupted if he waited for his assistant to recover from her traumatic ordeal, the Miracle Maker unceremoniously yanked her to her feet and thrust into her hand a shot gun. It was alarming enough, given all that had gone before, that he should be thinking of attempting the bullet catch, more alarming still was when he had to adjust the gun itself in the lady's hands so that it faced the right way.
Producing a bullet from his pocket he hurtled to the front of the stage and wildly gestured to me that I should come towards him. Nervous that I too would be hauled like a sack of potatoes onto the stage, I approached with some caution. However, my only task was to sign the bullet before it was rammed into the gun. Tension was beginning to build in the audience. The young couple had even stopped examining each other's tonsils for a few moments in order to watch this unlikely spectacle. Mysterio now backed away to the left of the stage. Unfortunately, because the curtains were not pulled far enough back, he actually disappeared from sight all together, leaving us simply with the view of an octagenarian woman swaying from side to side as she attempted to point the gun somewhere in his direction.
From behind the curtain we heard the Precarious Prestidigitator begin a commanding count to three at which point the lady was to fire the gun at him. One....Two....Three.
Considering that Belchington was at least 20 miles from the nearest hospital, I thought that the ambulance arrived rather quickly. The medics were somewhat surprised to find that not only were they to take The Amazing Mysterio away to have a nasty graze to his right ankle seen to, but also that they were required to treat an elderly lady for minor bruising caused when the recoil of the gun had thrown her off the stage. As the blue flashing lights disappeared away from the Memorial Hall, I gazed at the signed bullet which I had extracted from the stage floorboards a few minutes earlier as I considered whether I should ask Mrs. Punch and Judy dress for my money back since the man I had come to see had clearly not completed what he had set out to do. But then I decided that despite all it had been quite entertaining and in any case, I didn't want her to bar me from going next year when he returned to do it all again.
