REVIEW: TOM LEHRER IS TEACHING MATH AND DOESN’T WANT TO TALK TO YOU at Upstairs at the Gatehouse until 9 June 2024

Music and lyrics: A++

Book: C

‘A reminder of Lehrer’s lyrical deftness and remarkable talent for making you laugh.’



A few years back, the 1960s satirist Tom Lehrer, now an admired academic in his mid-90s, put all of his songs into the public domain. In other words, you can perform them all you like any time you like without paying him or anyone else a penny. And with a catalogue as rich as Lehrer’s, the temptation is great simply to put 25 of them on a stage of an evening with some slight supporting material to explore his brief but long-lasting musical career. Which makes this a difficult show to review – on the one hand, it’s unbelievably good entertainment, a brilliant night out, a reminder of Lehrer’s lyrical deftness and remarkable talent for making you laugh at, among other things, incest, nuclear holocaust, murder, racism and all and any religion or other pomposity.

On the other, the underlying book, hung fairly perfunctorily around two attempts by a journalist 30 years apart to find out why Lehrer simply stopped writing and performing and retreated into academic life, is as thin as can be in providing a framework to move very rapidly from one brilliant song to another.

Shahaf Ifhar provides a fine impersonation of the Lehrer still findable on Youtube, both vocally and in the dry delivery of interlinking material and his replies to the queries of the young and then older journalist (Nabilah Hamid), while Harry Style tinkles the ivories in precise Lehrer style in everything from the Vatican Rag to the show-closing, literal show-stopping Elements Song.

From the point of view of pleasing an audience, no ignoble task for a theatre and production team, the show’s a winner, and selling out one of our bigger pub theatres night after night. It’s hard to see how anyone could fail to find the Irish Ballad hilarious, and any songwriter who can rhyme “said he could have ‘er” with “sister’s cadaver” or “two, four, six, eight” with “transubstantiate” can have two hours of my night any time he likes.

But, and perhaps in the spirit of the man himself, one can’t help but wonder if a little more challenge to the now-saintly status Lehrer has with we afficionados might not have gone amiss. Sacrilege perhaps (of which Tom might well approve, of course), but a bit less song and a bit deeper questioning of what he was about, why he stepped away when he did, and whether satire like his simply plays to the converted rather than changing a single mind wouldn’t go amiss.

So an A++ for the music and the lyrics and a C for a book that tells you little the Wikipedia entry on Lehrer doesn’t contain. But, given that a packed audience walked out into the night whistling, humming and singing their personal favourite (each in their own individual key!), it seems curmudgeonly to criticise the choice to present Lehrer much more in his own words than in asking how, since his retirement, the slide down the razorblade of life has been for him.

TOM LEHRER IS TEACHING MATH AND DOESN’T WANT TO TALK TO YOU by Francis Beckett (and Tom Lehrer)

Director: Isaac Bernier-Doyle

Upstairs at the Gatehouse 28 May - 9 June 2024

Box Office: https://www.upstairsatthegatehouse.com/

Reviewer: David Weir’s plays include Confessional (Oran Mor, Glasgow), Better Together (Jack Studio, London). Those and others performed across Scotland, Wales and England, and in Australia, Canada, South Korea, Switzerland and Belgium. Awards include Write Now Festival prize, Constance Cox award, SCDA best depiction of Scottish life, and twice Bruntwood longlisted.