Taking your thoughts as read

Marc Salem is playing mind games at London's Tricycle Theatre

The so-called "mentalist" Marc Salem is returning to London with his one-man show, though, "I don't call it a one-man show, but a 400-man show," says Salem, talking over the telephone from New York, where Marc Salem's Mind Games is running on Broadway. "The audience guides what is going to happen: it depends on what they bring emotionally and mentally with them."

The so-called "mentalist" Marc Salem is returning to London with his one-man show, though, "I don't call it a one-man show, but a 400-man show," says Salem, talking over the telephone from New York, where Marc Salem's Mind Games is running on Broadway. "The audience guides what is going to happen: it depends on what they bring emotionally and mentally with them."

I ask him to perform a quick spot of mind-reading down the telephone to demonstrate his abilities. He guesses that I have a pink piece of paper on my right-hand side. It is actually on my left. I have written, very unusually, all over a piece of paper in pink ink.

"Every single night I am surprised," Salem continues. "One man brought a ring, and I guessed it was stolen, and he ran straight out of the theatre. Well, I guess he didn't want to get caught with it," he says. His party trick to end all party tricks is guessing a member of the audience's last holiday destination. "But another time I told a man to move seats. A minute later the man who had been sitting next to him vomited into the empty chair. It was lucky that he moved."

Salem has baffled audiences before, in London's West End, off-Broadway and at the Sydney Opera House. He took Marc Salem's Out of His Mind, a chat show with a difference, to Edinburgh in 2003. He examined the minds of three guests each night.

How does he practice his mind games? "To be able to understand and read people via non-verbal communication, I must keep my mind stimulated with puzzles, games, reading, research and human interaction," he says. "I also power nap for 20 minutes every afternoon," says Salem, who is up every morning by 4am.

How did he become interested in the mind? "As a child I was fascinated. I was very intuitive. I knew where my mother was going to take us on holiday before she told us and I knew which hat she would take from the hat box," says Salem, who can't fully explain how he does what he does. But he does say: "We have lost the ability to listen to our intuition, to moments when you just have that knowing feeling, in this age of electronic media. We don't pay attention to those little voices that can alert you to danger, or give you clues and information," says Salem of the "sixth sense" that he claims is not supernatural.

His father, a rabbi, was also gifted with the same intuition. "When he went into a career in counselling, he took on clients but could not separate from their pain and died at an early age because of it," he says.

Salem holds advanced degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and New York University. He was also director of research on the children's TV show Sesame Street, studying the development and nature of the mental process, and making sure that the pieces the show did were suitable for every country it went to and not just culturally specific to the USA.

About this show, Salem says: "It's the best party in town."

'Marc Salem's Mind Games', Tricycle Theatre, London NW6 (020-7328 1000), from tomorrow to 8 August