This quasi-theatrical promotion for the Science Museum tries - with its explosions, breathy excitement, vapours and audience participation - to straddle the boundary between education and entertainment. Think of a primary school science lesson crossed with pantomime.
Presenters Mark McKinley and Amanda Mahr, both accomplished actors, use audience children randomly chosen (not always a good idea) to teach serious points about there being two sorts of electricity but eight forms of energy, along with the nature of mass and how you weigh it in Newtons, among many other things. It’s all presented with dramatic, showman-like demos, complete with flashing lights and loud music. We’re almost in magic theatre territory.
And then, the next minute, McKinley and Mahr are in costume, acting out, slapstick-style, the competing intellectual claims of Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton. And soon McKinley is in drag for no apparent reason. Coherent theatre this is not. It is jerky, incongruous and unstructured.
Bitty as it is - and arguably far too teacherly for a Saturday night (with blatant Science Museum plugs in the form of interspersed film) - the audience of families, Scout groups and so on seemed to be lapping it up. And the sequence about Christopher Cockerell’s invention of the hovercraft, recreated on stage, is suitably spectacular.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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