The Age of Wonder

Doctor Austin

Bubble Show

Dr Bunhead 

Sticking to the good old-fashioned concept that children’s media should educate as well as entertain, a number of shows at the Fringe endeavour to get kids worked up about science. It’s not an easy balance to get right, whether with a cheap and cheerful amateur project or a bigger budget TV spin-off, so it’s no surprise to find that the results vary wildly.

The very rough-and-ready Doctor Austin and Sparks in Space uses little more than a makeshift lectern, a slightly worn hand puppet and a few painted backdrops to tell its story of a spacefaring dog who gets into a spot of bother with a black hole. Brimming with the smiley enthusiasm of a kids’ TV presenter, the show’s young creator Austin Lowe sports a colourful "spacesuit" and spiky purple hair as he plays both "Doctor Austin" and "Sparks" the dog. He refers to his very young audience as "space cadets", clearly loves his subject and is endearingly keen to impart some basic knowledge of the solar system, gravity, friction and other assorted physics.

But it’s hard to see what age group Lowe had in mind when writing the show, and crucially he does nothing to tailor it to the kids he’s got in today. Asking us to read phrases like "speed of light" off cue cards to cement the basic concepts is a clumsy technique in any case, and for this mostly pre-literate audience it’s entirely useless. The simple story is enough to hold most people’s attention and the odd bit of mild toilet humour keeps spirits in the room fairly high. But the science behind the plot is patchily and inconsistently explained, and I doubt that any of the under-sevens in the audience really got a handle on it.

Ditching the explanations almost altogether and going for simple spectacle is Louis Pearl and his Amazing Bubble Show. After dealing good-humouredly at the start of the show with an upset boy who shouts, inconveniently, “I hate bubbles!”, Pearl delivers a breathtaking show for those of us who love them. Using a variety of specially designed instruments, a few objects thrown on to the stage by the audience and an impressive degree of physical control, Pearl gives us bubbles inside bubbles, kids inside bubbles and towers of bubbles on top of kids’ heads. In some really gasp-inducing sequences he uses a canister of stage smoke to create, for example, the illusion of an opaque cube spinning inside a bubble cluster. The range and beauty of the effects really has to be seen to be believed and anyone who doubts that bubbles can fill almost an hour of stage time will be very pleasantly surprised.

Potentially the happiest medium between education and entertainment, Dr Bunhead is Volcano Head slightly underdelivers on its relatively big-budget promise. In the suitably academic environment of a university lecture theatre, Tom Pringle’s nerdy, pyrotechnic-obsessed character Dr Bunhead endeavours to teach us all about volcano science by making a variety of things go "bang".

The character is familiar to many from Sky TV’s Brainiac, and is perhaps better suited to television than the stage. While he makes a good stab at audience interaction and suitably clownish, pantomime humour, Pringle sometimes fails to project to the back of the large room and seems a little awkward throughout. The basic concepts, such as pressure and the changed state of materials at different heats, are fairly well explained and cleverly built up.

But the main point is the explosions, and we get some pretty cool ones, including rubber gloves and a hot water bottle. In addition, the lights are turned off for a beautiful "fire tornado" and some advanced use of luminescent chemicals. There are some technical problems that should have been ironed out this late in the run, which slightly ruin the flow of some of the sequences. But most thrill-seeking, science-hungry kids will go home happy.