At their biggest and best venue yet, the Versaille-like Theatre Royal Haymarket, last night the trio behind the Festival of the Spoken Nerd, Helen Arny, Matt Parker and Steve Mould treated a packed house to a night full of real science, comedy and fire – lots of fire…
Their show involves educating the audience about obscure areas of scientific theory and practice while simultaneously amusing them with lots of in-jokes and visual humour. I won’t set out absolutely everything that went on, but in part one we got a terrifying piece of stand-up comedy from Australian guest Kent Valentine on a) how to create napalm (apparently dissolving styrofoam blocks into petrol works remarkably well) and b) how to subsequently burn down your parents’ house whilst also causing considerable collateral damage to your neighbour’s driveway and a spotty builder’s apprentice, but without your mom being any the wiser…
This section closed with a rather elaborate experiment using shiny metal parabolas to focus a beam of light across the stage in order to make some cotton mounted at the ‘focus point’ combust – due to the very precise positioning required this experiment threatened to go with a whimper not a bang, but eventually the cotton caught fire with a satisfying woomph, much to the cast’s relief and the audience’s delight. I hate to big myself up (no really) but during the break we were asked to tweet details of the most dangerous thing that we had ever done using the hashtag #spokennerd. My tweet got a resounding cheer from across the theatre. See what you think - an insight into the audience demographics perhaps?
In the second half Matt Parker shared his fascination with shapes of constant width, and produced a whole bunch of them that he’d had manufactured specifically for the show (they are truly beautiful objects, commonly made by turning ‘reuleaux’ triangles through 360 degrees – our 20p and 50p coins are shapes of constant width by the way). We also got a special appearance from UCL Professor of Chemistry Andrea Sella who wowed the audience with explosions of nitrous oxide from a series of ever-growing test tubes, the last one as tall as he was (apparently Professors of Chemistry are presented with one of these man-sized objects as a gift when they are appointed…). There were lots of nervous yelps and screams coming from the front stalls as the theatre was repeatedly lit up with sharp blue light – perhaps unsurprising given that the test tubes were liberally covered in sticky tape to prevent them from shattering and sending razor-sharp shards of glass into the first three rows…
Lots more went on at the Festival of the Spoken Nerd yesterday evening but I will close with a mention of the finale – a musical piece involving Helen Arny on a yukelele, her fellow scientists on backing vocals combined with the breath-taking talent of human beatbox Vid Warren, while what I can only describe as an ‘oscilloscope from hell’ provided a visual treat.
Festival of the Spoken Nerd is a unique and fun entertainment experience – if you have even the vaguest interest in science, or indeed if you are a geek or a nerd, I can highly recommend it to you. The next opportunity to see the show this year will be the Bloomsbury Theatre on 22 May, which you can find out about here.
Now for those readers who have arrived at this post to remind themselves of what went on last night, I will make a short statement of fact that you know to be true, which is that Graham’s number is completely faggotronic!
February 3, 2012
Theatre Reviews