At the age of five, Mark Long sat on Einstein’s knee, but ‘nothing,
nothing at all rubbed off’. Forty years on, 26 of them with the People Show,
he offers us Albert’s theory of relativity for a fiver – ‘cheaper than an
Open University course’ and infinitely more entertaining – in The Solo Experience.
This is Long’s personal vision, a tribute to his fascination with physics
and his life in art. It also offers a new insight into the recent debate
of how art, imagination and God co-exist with science (and politics). He
illuminates for us how, with humour and irreverence, compassion and understanding,
we can sense a way through.

Long begins with the nothing at all – the void – satirically using the
voice-over of a children’s science show, then catapults us into the silliness
of visual childhood humour. The Milky Way is a milk bottle in an empty
frame in front of the first set of tatty red velvet curtains that symbolise
theatre for him (he carries a scrap in his pocket). The Earth appears as
a bandaged mirror globe, the sort of light seen in cheap cabaret clubs.
Nature is child’s toys: a miniature cow and a large woolly dog, the stage
manager in disguise, reading an atlas.

Adulthood intervenes and Long imagines himself the modern Adam, a suave
successful American scientist seducing his delectable co-worker Zelda,
who has just driven 250 miles for a Mexican take-away – the image of science
firmly based in filmic fantasy. Art is reduced to background music. The
splitting of body from mind, art from science mean that paradise is lost
– Long returns to his real self, the performer.

The roots of science and theatre lie together in classical Greece but
our popular mythology reduces physics to silly analogies, rather than the
serious matter of philosophers such as Anaxagoras and Leucippus who in the
5th century BC postulated the existence of the atom. Darwinism may have
made your granny a monkey, but Einstein’s theory of matter materialises
her into a knife and fork. Art has become the irreverent humour of the stand-up
comic who can explain these conundrums with quick jokes. The show then takes
a new curve as do time and light travelling together through space. All
this has been an elaborate preface for the real hub of the show: the concept
of the four dimensions of reality.

Again we begin at nothing, the first dimension was the empty theatre
before the show began. It is also suddenly serious and political. Mr Patel
in Calcutta needs a cataract operation but has no way of getting the – to
us – measly sum for it. He also does not exist for us. Art must also teach
us about those whom science seems to have abandoned. Through time we grow
older and look for things to fill the vacuum. Our eyes are opened through
the painful journey of life, as are Patel’s in the crudest smuggling of
a diamond in a bleeding anus into England. We can open the second red curtain.
This is the second dimension where time and action are frozen still. We
find it boring only because we have expectations of a tomorrow and a memory
of yesterday, unlike a goldfish in a bowl who has neither. It is an adolescence
where art is also boring. It is vision, poetry, that moves us through this
time: the glorious celebration in a jazz poem. The third dimension is reality:
the hell on earth of our humdrum lives. Death looms for Patel, love and
fantasy are destroyed. Life is a comic joke.

Why couldn’t we have been born old and get younger and younger? But
it is only by celebrating the dreadful joke of it all that we can pull aside
the last red curtain and glimpse the fourth dimension – a visual feast that
is the real forte of the People Show and a triumph of design from Chahine
Yavroyan whose marvellous lighting and sound effects have helped to transport
Long. It is an exuberant vision of beauty where all the images of the show
appear on a magic carousel. The past and future coincide as time and space
become meaningless; Mark, a child again, sits on the lap of science.

The People Show has broken new boundaries by showing the way art must
go, fusing science with imagination to create a lively vision. Underlying
it is the statement that science has ignored art and specifically theatre.
The two can coincide and artists as much as scientists deserve a livelihood.
I felt that Einstein’s ghost smiled down on the child, the artist, throughout.
He would have loved what did rub off on his knee. You will too.

*Chelsea Centre Theatre, World’s End Place, Kings Road, London SW10
at 8.30 pm until 5 December. No performances on Sundays. Tickets: £6.50,
£4.50 for concessions – £2 off with this issue of New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´.

Anna Ziman teaches drama in London.

The controversial heart of Profundis Theatre Company’s Operation Grapple
is firmly in the right place. The play deals with the appalling repercussions
experienced by the servicemen who witnessed Britain’s thermonuclear tests
on Christmas Island in 1958.

The play suggests that the Grapple tests were botched – a slight malfunction
triggered the bomb late and the resulting fallout in heavy rainfall exacerbated
any damage already caused to those who had been exposed unprotected to the
effects of the explosion. The play also touches on the subsequent cover-up
that led successive governments to deny any link between this and the veterans’
disproportionately high cancer rate and meant that claims for compensation
were rejected.

A powerful heart, I thought, and a deeply felt subject for the writer
and central performer, Peter Quilter – his father was one of these men.
His research with cowriter Ken McGinley, chair of British Nuclear Tests
Veterans Association, has been thorough and the argument the play presents
is convincing.

How disappointing, then, that the heart alone is not enough – for the
mouthpiece, the play, does not succeed dramatically. Theatre has the power
to move and shock an audience in a way that no documentary or recital of
the facts can. But Operation Grapple is as botched as the bomb it describes
– it falls short as theatre, rarely rising above the banal and naive, weighed
down by its mass of information and awkward structure. The play relies too
much on reportage or description and an out-dated agitprop format to affect
its audience deeply.

The play opens with a trite device, a politician in the 1950s reassures
the people of Britain about the imminent Pacific tests. This sets the time,
the official line and the scene. Then we meet the two main characters –
young national servicemen Woody and Kenny. They complain of bromide tea,
boredom and missing their lovers. The audience could well do the same, for
nothing really happens, the relationship is not fully explored and most
of the action is offstage. Mundane dialogue links anecdotes which, to be
fair, are often very funny and touchingly human.

But this is not enough. It’s the two little men themselves, flies to
the gods of politics and science, caught up in a vast event beyond their
ken and control that we want to know about.

Despite delighting in the gentle humour and charm Peter Quilter brings
to Kenny and our applauding the braveness of Christopher Snell’s efforts
to build a tautly emotional character in Woody, in the end we do not feel
drawn in enough to care deeply.

Just when we are getting interested in the two main characters, the
play veers off. The story and our response to it are smothered by more dreary
monologues from experts and cliched recitations of letters then interviews
with Margaret, Kenny’s future wife (played emotively by Jennifer Curtis)
telling us what will happen to him and her. It’s too much information presented
too predictably to work as theatre. We have learnt their fate beforehand,
been told what to think and feel. So instead of the play carrying us to
the climax – the detonation – and then chilling us with the description
of the after-effects: ‘Each roll of water brought in a tumble of dead and
dying fish . . . birds stripped of feathers blundered aimlessly over the
waste . . . crabs smoking in their shells’, the play continues long past
where it should have stopped, and then fizzles out.

Though it is worthy and heartfelt, Operation Grapple will be too easily
dismissed by a sophisticated theatre audience with money and the power to
change things. With its simplistic, almost Theatre-in-Education approach,
I only hope those who would enjoy it, the older secondary school children
whose parents were born after the Pacific tests, will see it.

Operation Grapple was shown at the Edinburgh Festival. It is touring
Yorkshire and North-West in October, and will be in London in November.
Telephone 061 225 0024 for dates and venues.

Anna Ziman is an actor and writer.

The Polka Theatre for Children* until 1 June

This summer’s show for eight-year-olds upwards succeeds when being just
that. It is delightful as a rudimentary introduction for 20th-century children
to the elements of the great 19th-century detective stories. Elementary,
Mr Holmes is less successful when writer Robin Kingsland tries to make the
play do too much by tagging on other elements, then justifying it all as
science-based.

Jo Watson is a sparky bebopping modern child (sorry, ‘responsible young
adult’) mysteriously transported back to Sherlock Holmes’s Victorian abode
where she encounters the great man with pipe and cohorts-the devoted Ponger,
leader of the undercover urchin gang and Ann Darrow, intrepid pioneering
woman journalist. They are all enlisted to outwit and out-witticism the
notorious Professor Moriarty and his vicious sidekick Carling by unravelling
their evil scheme to shame Holmes and thus sully his reputation forever.

Director Roman Stefanski and designer Fran Cooper, with the stylish
acting of Sarah Finch, Neville Hutton and Nicholas Tudor, evoke a sense
of this Victorian world and its characters beautifully. We believe that
we have been transported back into another age. The young audience hissed
spontaneously, in the true spirit of Victorian melodrama, at Gary Hope’s
wonderfully menacing Moriarty.

Marcia Hewitt brings such verve and charm to her portrayal of Jo that
she stands out as an energetic young anachronism with whom they can all
identify. She acts as a bridge between the two ages. That Holmes and company
do eventually succeed in foiling their enemies is largely thanks to her
but this proves the problem with the play.

Given that this is a children’s show with a simple plot, Holmes comes
across as a vain, ineffectual silly-billy, despite Peter Sowerbutt’s elegant
performance. He appears so obsessed with his own fury at his arch enemy
that he is incapable of seeing the trap that Moriarty has laid for him while
he follows a trail of clues (indeed, he seems no real match for him). Nor
is he capable of extracting himself from the trap without the help of our
smart 20th-century child. He is an old-fashioned adult duped by his own
arrogance. So the play succeeds – where Moriarty fails – in making a fool
of Holmes. This seems a bit of a disservice to the man, to the otherwise
faithful rendition of the spirit of the original stories, and gives the
play an odd slant.

How does it teach a child to learn from the past, from adults, let alone
respect the premise of scientific problem solving if they are all shown
as inadequate beside a smartarse child and her superior gadgets? To be fair,
Moriarty and his guns prove inadequate and Holmes does have the final say
in a nice twist at the end. But it doesn’t get over the basic confusion
that the play is billed as a ‘scientific mystery thriller’.

Certainly the play would not be such good children’s entertainment,
which it is, if it did not have elements of mystery and the suspense of
a thriller. Like all good detective stories it must have as its premise,
the basic scientific approach to problem solving, or as Holmes puts it,
an ‘explanation for everything under the sun’. As a good sideways introduction
into science for children this is fine, but to consider it in any other
way scientific is stretch-ing a point.

Characters do refer to modern scientific ideas but only fleetingly.
Too often these are brief mentions of gadgets, such as a digital computerised
watch or a camera, or the girl announces that smoking damages your health.
These notions are cursorily introduced, meet with Victorian bemusement and
are then dismissed. Kingsland has not incorporated them into the plot so
he misses the chance to explore the different concepts of what constitutes
scientific knowledge and principles in the two ages. This could have introduced
more humour. You are invited to share a feeling of smug 20th-century superiority
without really knowing why.

The shame is that the show is a charming introduction for children to
the values of good, solid professional theatre. It does not patronise its
audience or fall into the trap of being in any way ‘jolly dee’. And that
should be sufficient justification for its staging-not, as I understand
it, to attract audiences and funding by having to make concessions to the
demands that it match an aspect of the national curriculum, in this case
science.

*Polka Theatre for Children, 240 The Broadway, Wimbledon, London SW19
1SB. Tel: 081 543 4888. Tickets cost £4. Reduced prices for schools.
For 8-year-olds and above.

Znna Aiman is an actor, writer and occasional teacher.

How do you explain to eight-year-olds the basic principles of telecommunication
without boring or befuddling them? The Molecule Theatre’s production of
Gremlins in the works by Fred Harris solves this in a delightful blend of
science, theatricality and imaginative story-telling. It looks as if a brightly
coloured children’s book had come to life. A versatile cast animate stock
characters as they joke, tumble, sing and dance to John Moore’s charming
music through this scientific adventure for 7- to 11-year-old audiences.

The messages of this are not merely that you can gain information and
some idea of what scientific methods are, nor even that learning sciences
can be fun. There is also a deeper message: armed with knowledge, you can
solve problems with science rather than superstition and so defeat chaos,
ignorance, bosses and bogies – all the gremlins, in the plays’ words.

As in all good children’s stories the plot is simple, a journey of discovery
through the unknown with suspense, mystery, threatening forces and humour
along the way. It all ends happily, of course, with our hero and heroine
saved from a fearful fate. Alex (played by Christopher Penney) is a fledgling
disc jockey at a radio station bugged by telephones that do not work properly.
Threatened with the sack by his boss Mr Grim (Tim Wright), unless he solves
the problem and saves his ratings, he blames gremlins in the works. Off
he is whisked, in a puff of dry-ice smoke, to the creatures’ subterranean
world of bright red and blue corroding pipes and giant telephone parts to
find an answer. He is joined by Lucy (a vibrant performance from the charismatic
Juliet Moore), whose ambition to be an engineer has been thwarted by Mr
Grim, and armed with knowledge from evening classes and her science text
book, they set out together on this quest.

Through their discoveries, we learn the principles of the transference
of sound and the detailed workings of the telephone. We whizz through the
internal working of transmitters and receivers, electronic exchanges and
digital transmission to learn how communication satellites and even fax
machines work, with the help and hindrance of three gremlins. The gremlines
are the sort of monsters that children love best – garish, fluffy, stupid,
frightening, funny and acrobatic. They have lovely yucky names – Greazle,
Globule and Gloop. Anne Johnson, Una McNulty and Dietrich Griffiths give
each gremlin its distinctive personality. But it was Gloop (Griffiths) who
stood out – earning the greatest tribute from the young audience as ‘the
character they liked the best’.

For me, the real stars were the inventive touches (crisps dancing on
a drum skin to illustrate the movement of carbon granules in a transmitter;
props appearing from nowhere on disembodied fluffy arms), the work of director
Karen Johnson and superb designer Peter Griffiths. There was a simple theatrical
magic that made complex concepts clear and easy to grasp. Despite a production
slick enough to please an audience weaned on television, I found the performance
lacked an overall tightness; the actors were low on projection and energy,
both much needed in a space the size of the Bloomsbury Theatre, especially
when dealing with such a young audience. In spite of this, I found it perverse
that a show about the transformation and distortion of sound failed to use
microphones for the songs, particularly as the sinister Great Gremlin playing
as a disembodied voice on the PA system was so effective. It would have
helped the actors, as the audience would have been helped by more participation
and the updating of some of the jokes.

Anna Ziman is an actor and writer.