Brighton Fringe review by Steve Bennett

After a booming Vegas-style voiceover, comedy mindreader (or ‘comedium’) Peter Antoniou warms us up with some call-and-response hollers, pitching one half of the room agains the other.

Yet such high-energy showmanship isn’t him at all, and he doesn’t look that comfortable with it. For, like many a mentalist, he is really an introverted nerd who spent his formative years painstakingly learning the tricks of his stage.

When he lets those hard-earned skills shine, he’s a lot more at ease with the performance. For he is exceptionally good at his job, demonstrating a series of seemingly impossible feats of mindreading. We’re all asked to write our names, an obscure fact about ourselves and a question to ask a psychic on cards as we enter – cards that are then tipped into a goldfish bowl, out of his reach.

The bulk of the show has him determining those personal secrets  and figuring out the questions with proficiency… though sometimes the answers to the queries are inevitably beyond the reach of someone who makes no ridiculous claims about spirit guides or communing with the universe. Being an entertaining trickster is calling enough.

For all the jiggery-pokery, there is one genuine riddle. What is the point of pulling a tarot-like card out for every person he speaks to, never to return to it? Maybe it’s just because the decks are also his merch, available in the foyer after the show.

Whether he lives up to the comedian part of his billing is more of a moot point. His attitude is generally witty and mischievous – but then, aren’t they all? And when he does do a gag in place of a trick, it’s a little anticlimactic – especially when it comes at the end, when the audience  expect his most jaw-dropping stunt.

For it’s spectacle everyone’s come for and, this aside, it’s spectacle that he delivers. But then, with his talents, he surely knew I was going to write that…

Review date: 13 May 2016
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett