“We’re not machines,” Robert Newman is here to remind us. “We’re animals.” Newman recently submitted himself to a brain scan as part of a UCL research project. But in his new show, neuroscience itself gets scanned for hubris and faulty logic, as our host rails against the orthodoxy that – to quote the title of a recent bestseller – We Are Our Brains. It’s another chewy, thought-provoking and wryly amusing hour from the novelist/activist/comic, raising one big eyebrow at science’s dafter claims while hymning the (so far) unfathomable wonders of consciousness and the natural world.
It feels like a companion piece to 2013’s New Theory of Evolution, in which Newman challenged the idea that competition drives species’ development. Darwin features here too, as Brian Cox gets dissed for equating evolution with progress. That’s in a second half that drifts from Newman’s tight focus on brain science – witness a rant against neuroscientist VS Ramachandran for proposing that a smile is just an “aborted snarl”. But it’s all animated by a passionately humanist opposition to the fashion whereby, “if it’s not dehumanising, it’s probably not science”.
Highlights include a well-worked anecdote about Newman’s friendship with a researcher into the neuroscience of guilt. In a show that often feels (not least because of Newman’s Victorian dress sense) like an animated cabinet of curiosities, there are detours into the loneliness of the Amazonian spider, and the similarities between capitalists and lemon ants. In performance terms, it’s low-octane: a routine about his nosy neighbour meanders on too long; his ukulele ditties are peripheral. But that’s part of Newman’s nonconformist charm, and (I suspect) his intention: awkwardness and pensiveness are more likely to bump us out of our complacency – to engage our brains, indeed – than conventional comic timing and delivery. They certainly do so here.
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At Soho theatre until 23 January, then on tour from 30 January. Box office: 020-7478 0100.
