A new play stages Darwin’s first inklings of scientific revolution

By J.W.S.W.

THE Natural History Museum in London was envisioned by its Victorian founders as a cathedral of science. The ambience of its cavernous central hall is appropriately ecclesiastical, with tall stained-glass windows and vaulting Romanesque arches. Enthroned at one end of the hall, in place of an altar, is a statue of Charles Darwin. He looks every inch the 19th-century gentleman naturalist: frock coat, stern look and majestic beard. Like his similarly hirsute contemporary Karl Marx, Darwin is fixed in the collective imagination as an eternal septuagenarian.

Last year “Young Marx” depicted the political-philosopher in his early 30s, reminding theatregoers that the founding father of revolutionary socialism was once a penniless Soho-dweller with a fondness for the bottle. Now Darwin has been given similar—if gentler—treatment, in a new play staged in the Natural History Museum’s Jerwood Gallery, a few feet away from the statue and surrounded by the intellectual fruits of Darwin’s theory. “The Wider Earth” dramatises the circumnavigatory voyage of HMS Beagle, the navy ship to which the 22 year-old Darwin was attached as naturalist-in-residence. The trip enabled Darwin to accumulate a mass of specimens and observations, the fragmentary clues that would fit together to form the basis of his epochal work “On the Origin of Species”.

David Morton’s production, which has itself travelled from Australia, is ambitious. Elaborate visual effects are projected onto a screen; a revolving set serves variously as ship’s cabin, tropical jungle and mountain range. The production begins with a recording of the first lines of the Book of Genesis played over a video montage of Big Bangs and black holes: a fitting suggestion that Darwin, the great seeker of roots and beginnings, is getting an origin story of his own.

His tale begins at Cambridge, where the young Charles (a chipper and earnest Bradley Foster) skives off his undergraduate Classics course to collect beetles and rocks, much to the righteous disdain of his father (Ian Houghton). The younger Darwin’s obsessive pursuit of specimens draws the attention of botanist John Stevens Henslow (Andrew Bridgmont), who takes the budding naturalist under his wing, covering for him when he skips lectures and plying him with extra-curricular reading. Eventually, Henslow orchestrates Darwin’s summons from the organisers of the Beagle voyage. After much teen movie-style agonising over whether to “dream big” or to settle into priestly training and a country parsonage, Darwin sets off to join the crew of Captain Robert Fitzroy (Jack Parry-Jones).

The adversarial but warm relationship between Fitzroy and Darwin is extensively recorded in their correspondence. In this play, it handily stands in for the ideological stakes of the voyage. For the butterfly-net toting Charles, visits to the Canary and Galapagos islands are a scientist’s sweetshop. For Fitzroy, they are a means of extending the “guiding hand of the Empire”. With colonial zeal, Fitzroy names a South American hill after Darwin as a birthday present. (“Save anything for yourself?” Darwin asks. “Just the mountain range,” Fitzroy casually replies.) In their arguments about slavery and Christianity, there is a sense that the incipient scientific upheaval is coinciding with a broader cultural shift towards enlightened modernity. Of course, the two are linked: Darwin’s apprehension of humanity’s shared biological roots underlined his support for abolitionism.

The attempt to cover so much historical and conceptual ground is admirable, especially for an educational production pitched at all ages. Soon though, the relentless stream of events and content becomes hard to follow. When Charles blissfully opines that he has “seen enough islands to last a lifetime”, watch-checking parents in the audience might be forgiven for muttering their agreement. The script’s clanging jumble of cod-Victorian jargon and Hollywood cliché doesn’t help.

The production is saved by its real stars: the beasts, birds and bugs that Darwin encounters on his excursions. They are portrayed by a cast of ingenious puppets, operated onstage by actors. Constructed with hundreds of pieces of laser-cut wood, and with the help of Handspring, the producers of “War Horse”, the onstage fauna is itself a result of intelligent design. A delicate butterfly rests for a moment on Charles’s hand, slowly beating its wings; an iguana convincingly squirms and snaps; Galapagos tortoises plant their ancient feet with ponderous dignity. Often the most magical effects are the simplest: tiny LED bulbs on the ends of fishing rods conjure a cloud of celestial fireflies.

The only disappointment is the brevity of the puppets’ appearance before Darwin’s return home to England, fame and Emma Wedgwood, his long-suffering fiancée. The play’s only female character, she disappointingly spends most of her limited stage time having things explained to her by Darwin. And, for all the novelty of a fresh-faced young Darwin, in truth the Beagle story has hardly gone untold. Given that there's no shortage of plays about the feats of distinguished men, perhaps the next onstage biography of a 19th-century luminary might feature a protagonist who is beardless because of her gender, rather than her age.