Review by Steve Bennett

At the start of his show, Lieven Scheire explains that he’s going to tell us all about Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity. We laugh.

But he’s not joking.

Few are the comedy shows that ask their audience to solve a coefficient of time dilation for objects at near-light-speed velocities, but there it is on the white board – algebra, with Greek letters and everything. For however much Scheire dresses this up, it’s a lecture more than it is a sciencey comedy show.

That lecture is, of course, light-hearted, but the jokes are more of a kind an academic would make than a comedian would – targeting for example mathematicians for having no social skills or engineers for being unimaginative.

Scheire is something of a celebrity in his native Belgium – which admittedly might sound like an accolade on a par with being one of the tallest dwarfs. Playing the Gilded Balloon’s Wee Room could be seen as a comedown since he plays 1,000-seaters back home, but his enthusiasm is undimmed. The Belgians know him as the host of pop science shows and panel-show regular, and is described in his Fringe blurb as his nation’s cross between Dara O Briain and Stephen Fry. Certainly he has found a demographic hungry for accessible science.

Scheire, performing in a ‘geek and proud’ T-shirt, is certainly a great communicator with an affable and credible air; which is invaluable as some of the quirky consequences of relativity that he describes will defy your every common-sense instinct. Scientifically, he doesn’t go into the origins of the theory, just that’s it’s a mathematical trick that’s proved to work – and even with the maths you’re pretty much left to take his conclusions at face value, particularly the second of his thought experiments involving a supersonic fly, which incredible in the word’s true meaning.

Whether The Wonderful World of Lieven Scheire sits as happily as a comedy show as it would the comic relief in an academic setting is a moot point – it’s certainly stronger on being ‘interesting’ than being ‘hilarious’ – but whoever books the Royal Institution Christmas lectures might want to take notice.

Review date: 9 Aug 2015
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Gilded Balloon Teviot