Keith Barry: ‘I want to push people over the cliff emotionally’

As he prepares to resume his Unhinged tour, mentalist Keith Barry talks learning from grief, psychedelic drugs, and why most of us just want a cure-all pill

Mentalist and magician Keith Barry at the Everyman Palace ahead of his two shows at the Cork theatre on October 16 and 17. Picture: Noel Sweeney

Sat, 10 Oct, 2026 - 01:00

Mary Cate Smith

Keith Barry’s father passed away last January, and for the first time in his life, he “struggled with feeling down”.

His dad, Ken, had one parting wish.

“Bring me on tour, Keith,” to which Keith replied: “Dad, we know where we’re at, we’ve only got a couple of days left.” Even in his passing moments, Ken Barry shot back with his trademark dark humour.

“No, no, you fucking eejit, bring my dead ashes on tour — mess with their minds.”

That’s where the concept for Keith’s show was born. Unhinged — The Final Shows, his two-hour, 20-minute show plays at The Everyman on October 16 and 17.

So what can the audience expect? And should they be scared?

With a name like Unhinged — and Keith’s use of hypnosis, psychology, and NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) — we can expect him to control attention but not our thoughts.

“I want to push people over the edge of a cliff emotionally — like [in] a really good horror film,” he says.

Keith shows photographs of his dad along with the urn with his ashes of his dad and invites him to inhabit his guests.

Expect scares, shocks, dark moments… followed by big laughs. I’m a mentalist, not a medium. I don’t believe in talking to the dead – I just make it look very convincing.

While Keith says he wants people to feel unhinged, he is clear that he pushes the boundaries without crossing the line.

“They know there’s psychological safety, that I’m always in control,” he explains.

Keith hacks into my mind

I don’t love the idea of Keith hacking my neurodiverse brain but in the spirit of being a good sport, I agree to suspend disbelief and invite him into my mind.

The first “trick” is to think of my first kiss. I had hoped to keep this memory tightly wound in my own brain for eternity — and growing up in an era without social media, I had thought it was a very real possibility.

But this is Keith Barry and it’s not often I have a celebrity brain hacker (from my hometown of Waterford) looking to get inside my mind, so I agree, albeit reluctantly.

He asks me to think of a person or a pet and to write it down on a piece of paper, folded with my initials, and to place it inside a box. I’m desperately trying to shield it from his gaze.

“Imagine that I’m becoming a celebrity, man or woman, dead or alive, it doesn’t matter,” he says.

“Open up your phone and search for the person, type it in, but don’t let me see — I’ll look the other way. Now it’s important that you actually see an image of the person, so hit images, yeah? And then when you’re done, lock your phone off.”

Guess what? He guesses the celebrity, the first name of my first kiss, and makes a personal connection between the two — what else does he know?

Stay away from this brain, Keith, it’s ever so slightly mad.

The “game” (Keith’s own words) draws on personal connections but is he actually reading my mind or just steering my thoughts?

And has he some inbuilt peekability I don’t know about?

Through years of studying psychological techniques (being a Wim Hof advocate is one) Keith assures me that he’s not actually reading my mind, he’s reading micro-actions and connecting them to my personal life.

And that’s Keith’s sole purpose. It’s not just tricks, it’s finding personal connections, it’s storytelling with audience participation — and in this show, he draws you into his own personal story. You’re watching in real time the trajectory of his grief and how he deals with it.

When Keith is on stage, he feels at home and having his dad’s ashes on stage with him has allowed him to be totally open, something he hasn’t fully felt before.

I felt constricted by television… the true version of me wasn’t coming out. I want people to really know the real me.

It’s important for him to be authentic on stage, he says: “I’m exposed and I’m raw in the show… I reveal my true self… I’m more authentic than I’ve ever been.”

Is this all a ruse, though? He’s one of the hardest-to-read people I’ve ever come across but then again some of the most influential mentalists of my childhood seemed to achieve the impossible. Remember David Copperfield being SAWN IN HALF in Death Saw? Or David Blaine entombed in a massive block of ice for 63 hours in Times Square? I’m getting the willies all over again.

From the get-go, Keith says he’s not acting, he’s hacking brains. “Fifty percent of the time I hack brains for fun, and 50% of the time I do it to create meaningful change in people’s brains. There’s no acting, because I am what I am when I do what I do.

Keith Barry says he incorporates many disciplines into his show, including hypnosis, psychology, and neuro-linguistic programming Picture: Noel Sweeney

"Just a trick"

“But there’s a lot of different techniques in what I do, NLP (neurolinguistic programming), I use real hypnosis, trance, psychology.

“So, if you were at my house right now, and you were in my office, I’m just surrounded by books, books, books, books, books, books. So, I’m taking different philosophies and ideas and psychology ideas, and I’m implementing those into my work.” Expect illusion, subliminal inference showmanship so spellbinding, it’s what you could call magic. Sometimes, though, he admits it’s “just a trick”.

Keith is turning 50 this year and he feels he’s mellowing with age. That’s partly to do with his role in his family and relationships with his son, Braden, 14, and daughter, Breanna, 17, and Mairead, his wife, who he’s been with since he was a teenager and asked her brother to set them up in a nightclub.

I can’t imagine it would have happened without the infamous slow set that has sadly died out for the lovely youth of today. Braden is a rugby enthusiast who “couldn’t do one magic trick”, he tells me. Keith is very proud that he doesn’t feel obliged to follow him onto the stage.

Breanna is a “complete badass, she’s so fearless”. He watched her overcome any nerves and leap from a 24ft platform (“its a high drop into ice water that normally only the advanced instructors do”) called The Ice Man Challenge Cliff Jump.

Keith’s wife, Mairead, is the North Star of the family. Earlier this year, he started to feel burnout from trying to balance touring with corporate events and spending time with this family.

“By the end of January, February, I was wrecked. I was pretty much burnt out so I sat down with my wife and said ‘I can’t do this volume of work… I want to give my best to everything that I do.’ Mairead is his sounding board and a constant steadying presence for him — he seeks her advice all the time.

Add in the learning from his experience of grief and his constant research into neuroplasticity, Keith is more chilled than ever.

“I’ve become much more relaxed in my older age. I’ve learned to have more empathy for people. When I’m walking down the street here in Cork, every person I make eye contact with, I wonder what they’re going through today.” While Keith’s grief for his father hit hard, he then had to face another tragedy — the family dog, Magick died, aged five.

Even with those two losses, Keith still went on stage — and you can clearly see how his show plays out in real time, his way of dealing with bereavement.

Riding the waves of grief afforded Keith the ability to care less about social media trolls and fake news.

“Somebody sent me a message, just after Dad passed saying; ‘be grateful for what you have. Some of us were born with monsters’.

“That level of understanding other human beings isn’t out there at the moment. Too many people are ready to attack everyone, not just online but in person.

“Even this morning, I saw something that I didn’t like happen this morning. I purposely didn’t say anything, and luckily the person apologised. They didn’t need to apologise to me, but they did need to apologise to somebody else. it’s just as well they did, because I was probably going to pull them up on it.”

He’s trying to be more empathetic with his real life and online dealings with people.

“I don’t like saying this, but that’s somebody who was probably going through a bad day themselves, yeah. Then they’re taking it out on other people, it’s just not good enough.

“It takes time, I get it wrong sometimes, like everybody else, like that person did this morning.”

Keith has performed 20 shows and now has 12 left. He’s planned to do a show solely dedicated to hypnosis — there’s so much to explore with that and he hasn’t done it for years.

He’s also planning to take on more corporate work and motivational speaking.

This is the man who has worked with Woody Harrelson on the Hollywood movies Now You See Me: Now You Don’t and its sequel. I’m signing up for the motivational workshop. Now, how to block out the memories of me being a brazen article in the 90s. Don’t look at that era, Keith. Please?