Staging a children’s entertainment show with an educational bent is often something of a risk. Too much teaching, you’ll bore them rigid, but amp up the fun and the will to learn falls by the wayside. It’s a precarious balancing act, which Marvellous Medicine, on the whole, manages to achieve in a fun, breezy hour of rudimentary science.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that doctor double act Alistair Linsell and Kate Cross have opted to produce it as ‘wacky lessons’ are very much in vogue. That’s certainly the mould here; zany gags and clownish buffoonery are used with varying degrees of success to explain the wonders of the nervous system and antibiotics. There’s audience interaction a’ plenty, and it’s a joy to see children on stage playing at penicillin (with foam baseball bats), beating back bacteria (a puppet crocodile). It’s hardly an imaginative or original set, but you did get the sense that the target audience were learning without realising it, which is ultimately the point.
The performers themselves are an affable, if not particularly charismatic pair, adept at conjuring up enthusiasm to a point. Award winning science communicator Linsell gets all the best lines, but it’s newcomer Cross’ quietly withering reactions to his bumbling is the real gem, hinting at a level of sophistication you wish the show would have made more of. There is an undercurrent of reticence, however, towards the sillier material; it’s clearly not a natural fit for either of them, a shame considering that it’s one of the fundamental characteristics of the genre, and can make for terrific entertainment.
Take Marvellous Medicine for what it is, a light biology lesson with some frothy amusement thrown in. Whilst it isn’t likely to inspire the next generation of healthcare heavyweights, you’ll come away with a greater understanding of pain, and hopefully get to hit a puppet crocodile in the process.
