Edinburgh Fringe 2026
Colin Cloud: Hoax
Colin Cloud
Genre: Magic and Mentalism
Venue: Pleasance Courtyard The Grand
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
The baffling, charismatic and magnetically freakish Hoax sees Colin Cloud combine astonishing mentalism with a warmer, cheekier stage presence than seen before. The tricks become increasingly impossible, the audience reactions speak for themselves and Cloud looks every inch a performer operating at the very top of his game.
Review
Colin Cloud: Hoax is playing at the Pleasance Courtyard, Grand at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2026.
Cloud’s prior appearance at the festival in 2024 with his show Consequences, was received with critical acclaim and Hoax builds upon the reputation of a mentalist whose work is now internationally acclaimed, and rightly so. Ask anyone in this country to name a mentalist and we all know what the answer is likely to be. Mentalism seems to be a market highly dominated by one man, but it feels as though it’s time for a changing of the guard and Colin Cloud seems ready to step up to the plate. Fresh from a residency in Las Vegas, he finds himself in Edinburgh in August due to the fact that he’s a native and is going to marry his fiancée, so why not, instead of using that time to plan the flowers or book the wedding entertainment, book out a full run at the Edinburgh Fringe?
As the audience file into the Pleasance’s enormous Grand venue, we see a single spotlight illuminating Cloud playing chess against himself. The mood is serious, tense and highly focused. A giant projection on the wall resembles an old-fashioned police detective board, with strings connecting images and words all revolving around the themes of truth, hoaxes and what to (and not to) believe.
When Cloud opens the show the energy lifts and, having watched his previous show in 2024, there is a distinct shift in how he now works with the audience. On his last Fringe run, it felt as though he was making an attempt to consistently retain his air of intensity and mystique and while that led to a good show, you never really felt like you got a sense of the man. This time around, it feels as though he has made a conscious effort to allow more of his natural personality to come through and it does a lot to lift the material in a positive way. He’s cheeky, dry and playfully patronises us without ever descending into anything hurtful to the audience.
Even with this addition to the act, there is still something magnetically freakish about the way he goes about his business. He sets us up with a few quick-fire mental set-pieces, each of left my 11-year-old daughter in particular with her jaw on the floor. He asks us which of us are sceptics and which are believers, out of curiosity more than anything else. His self-confidence in his ability never wavers as he ramps up the mind tricks to increasingly complex and baffling degrees.
At times, he uses a camera pointed towards the audience to capture our reactions to his mentalism. Perhaps the most impressive of these interactions sees him accuse a peripheral member of the audience on the screen, i.e. not the person he was talking to, of ‘thinking too loudly’ before telling that audience member exactly what he was thinking. To see the man’s face go slack with wonder confirmed to me that he wasn’t a plant and yet somehow Cloud had picked from his brain the very song he was thinking of and not only that he had a dog, but that the dog’s name was Molly. This is the kind of detailed and incredible feat of perception you can expect to see if you manage to catch Cloud.
Hoax feels like Colin Cloud hitting another level. The astonishing mentalism remains but allowing more of the man behind the mystique to emerge makes the whole experience warmer, funnier and ultimately more engaging. Derren Brown may be the name that comes to mind when you think of mentalism but Colin Cloud is making an increasingly compelling case that there is room at the top for for a fresh face.
