I think about the curriculum has modified since my day however, even so, I’m fairly certain not many biology classes appear to be this one by Mamoru Iriguchi. With a dressing-up-box aesthetic and a naive enthusiasm, the Edinburgh performer casts the viewers within the position of 14-year-old pupils at “Summerhall secondary faculty”. Ably assisted by Afton Moran, utilizing hand-knitted pubic hair and clownfish costumes as visible aids, and making natty use of a pc monitor that turns real-world objects into display screen animations, he takes us by way of the evolutionary story of replica. It’s an illustrated lecture that traces the journey from the earliest sea creatures to the looks of land animals and onwards to the current day.
The present has a rough-and-ready appeal, carried out with extra enthusiasm than subtlety, and an appropriately adolescent sense of humour. It takes a wide-eyed strategy to the attract of human nudity (no different creature is turned on by nakedness) and the magic of organisms that may reproduce by severing components of their very own physique .
For probably the most half, it’s cheery stuff, modestly entertaining and – if not precisely the Reith lectures – mildly informative. The hour-long present strikes up a gear, nevertheless, within the remaining part when the actors contemplate their very own sexuality and gender id.
Setting our present discussions about gender fluidity and transsexuality within the context of tens of millions of years of evolutionary historical past, they argue there isn’t any extra purpose to insist on binary definitions in human beings than there’s to cease a male clownfish turning feminine. On this method, their very own shifting identities are only a small a part of an extended and engaging story.