I wish all science lectures could be musical. It certainly makes an hour go fast, and I think I may have actually learnt something for the first time since I left university. They say that you remember things better if you sing them, and indeed it will now be a long time before I forget this clever, quirky and genuinely fun interpretation of Richard Dawkin’s bestseller, The Selfish Gene.We first meet an accurate – but not exaggerated – Dawkins in a situation something like a lecture. He lays down the idea of our bodies being constructed by, and for, our genes, with a catchy tune – ‘we are machines, made by our genes’. The earnest but protesting students in Dawkins’ seminar morph easily into the typically nuclear Adamson family, whose catastrophic day-in-the-life elaborates and explains some of the potentially alien elements of the evolutionary concept. The onstage musicians and Dawkins himself loom and lurk and interrupt, providing a fresh comedic twist and stopping the science from ever getting too heavy.Complicated time signatures for many of the tunes meant they were disappointingly not as catchy as they could have been, and the cast themselves struggled to keep up. The songs relied heavily on repetition to be remembered, and I would question whether the cast were ever actually singing, rather than talking rhythmically to music.This is an inspired comedic interpretation of what is essentially an instructional scientific book. The writing is funny, engaging and endearing and you can’t help but leave with the sneaking suspicion that you understand. T-shirts printed with each character’s role humorously simplified scene interpretation, and while the Adamsons’ over-expression came across as hammy at first, it brought easy laughs and set a wry tone for the rest of the production.
