Tomorrow two middle-aged men will stand on stage goading the audience to vote for the other to stand in a coffin-shaped casket and be blasted by a 1m volt bolt of lightning.

Psychology professor Richard Wiseman and science writer and physicist Simon Singh are the intrepid duo prepared to risk their lives in a London theatre in the name of science.

“If it hits me or Richard that is pretty much goodbye,” explains Singh breezily. “The household supply is 240 volts; this is potentially lethal.”

The electricity will crackle between two copper coils in a spectacular display — the theory is that the metal piping on the casket will prevent the volunteer being fried alive.

“It’s a bit like the circus,” says Wiseman. “If it goes wrong there’s the potential for tremendous risk.” He adds drily: “Hopefully there will be a second show on Tuesday.”

So why take the chance? Singh and Wiseman are part of a band of enthusiasts taking radical steps in a desperate bid to switch people on to science, an unpopular subject with many schoolchildren, who complain that it is “boring”. The enthusiasts’ tactics include presenting science as theatre, magic tricks and fantasy.

Wiseman, for instance, a former magician who has investigated the paranormal, is also being funded to create a “wow box” for schools, full of magic tricks for teachers to perform, with a DVD explaining the science behind each illusion.

But such moves are not welcomed by all scientists. The fear has been raised that the subject is being dumbed down. Are magic, fantasy, theatre and investigations into the paranormal really science? “There are quite a number of stick in the muds in the universities who think this is a bit undignified,” says Russell Stannard, a retired physics professor and author — although he stresses that he is not one of them.

Wiseman, however, disagrees. “We are very anti the idea we are dumbing down,” he says. “These initiatives are needed because the situation is desperate.”

“As a magician, I watch children’s faces and they are full of wonder and fun. I watch them learning science and it all slips away.”

The pair are working against the background of widespread uncertainty about how to reverse the plummeting numbers of children studying science at A-level or as a degree. Last week a government inquiry into threatened closures of university chemistry and physics departments declined to bail them out with extra cash.

A survey this month of 1,000 school children found that half those questioned said science lessons were boring, confusing or difficult. Even bestselling US- born author Bill Bryson has admitted that one reason he wrote his layman’s guide to science, A Short History of Nearly Everything, was because he found the subject such a mind-numbing turn off at school.

“We want people to realise science is not boring. It’s about a lot more than equations and text-books,” says Singh. “These are our entrepreneurs and unless something is done we will not have any in 10 years time.”

Henry Gee, a palaeontologist and a science writer at Nature magazine, agrees that the way science is taught in many schools — with an emphasis on facts and formulae and very few whizzy experiments — leaves kids cold.

Gee, too, wants to put fantasy and the imagination at the heart of how we teach science. “Fantasy is something we should have more of in science education,” he says.

When he tours schools with his book about the science of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Gee tells enthralled children that fire- breathing dragons are like the Bombardier beetle — which turns its back on its enemies before squirting them with a lethal chemical concoction.

Like Singh and Wiseman — whose show sold out within days of tickets going on sale — he’s getting an enthusiastic response. He explains how far elves can see and how orcs might reproduce — though he admits that he hasn’t come up with a plausible answer to “How does the Ring make its wearer invisible?” Gee blames ministers as well as established scientists for defining science so strictly that popular phenomena such as magic, astrology and the paranormal are ruled out of its domain.

“Science in Britain is going the way of the dinosaurs — a one-way road to extinction,” he says. “Prominent scientists . . . just turn people off.”

But after all the talk about spectacle and magic, there is general agreement that a pragmatic solution to the country’s science crisis is needed. Singh believes the exodus of kids from science is down to the chronic shortage of properly qualified teachers. In 2003 one in 10 physics and chemistry lessons were taught by a teacher with not even an A-level in the subject.

He calls on ministers to stop burying their heads in the sand, holding the occasional science year or sending the odd popular science book to libraries.

Instead, he says, they should set targets for the number of science graduates teaching in schools and if the targets are not met within, say, two years, the minister responsible should resign.

Now that is fantasy.