An Audience With Colin Fry
New Theatre, 7th & 8th September

I went along to see Colin Fry, ‘the country’s most famous spiritualist medium’, with a mind carefully switched to ‘open’, trying to set aside an ingrained scepticism in an attempt to give myself every opportunity to be convinced (though I wasn’t quite sure of what), or at least to learn something valuable or intriguing about human nature.

There was a palpable feeling of excitement as the theatre was filling up. A camera trained upon the auditorium, picking out each audience member and projecting them on to a big screen at the back of the stage. On a stool in front of the screen were a glass of water and a box of tissues. Before Fry himself had even reached the stage, we had a fair (and slightly worrying) idea of what form the evening was going to take.

Trained as a professional medium from the age of seventeen, Fry is a consummate performer, charming and humorous; his own warm-up man. In fact the most surprising thing about the whole show was the relaxed way in which it was conducted. I use the word ‘show’ advisedly; whatever one’s private opinion about the truth behind psychic powers, there was no denying that this was, and was intended to be, an absorbing piece of theatre. Fry would stand quietly on stage, waiting for a message which would direct him to a specific member of the audience. Sometimes wide of the mark, sometimes breathtaking detailed and accurate, communications ranged from a dead husband’s disapproval of gardening plans to the reassurances of a cot-death baby. Some of it was pretty harrowing stuff, but I’ll confess I was slightly taken aback by the pedestrian preoccupations of the dead, having (naively?) hoped for something a little darker: Aeneas meeting Hector in the underworld, maybe.

I’m not sure exactly what I’d hoped to get out of the evening, but I certainly didn’t leave convinced of ‘life after death’, nor did I learn anything much about human nature apart from that it is eternally hopeful. But the point is that Fry’s show was not intended for me, or for those like me, and I feel vaguely guilty writing about the people I saw as though they were performing tricks for my amusement. They weren’t; they were ordinary, bereaved, sad, seeking people, and if the show wasn’t aimed at me, it was certainly aimed at them, and I imagine they were comforted. Whether that’s a good thing, I’ll leave up to you.