Captain Fitzroy's (Jack Parry-Jones) voyage was actually a second attempt to map the world, taking over from a previous commander whose travels around South America ended badly; quite how badly isn't something Fitzroy's willing to tell prospective crew members until it's too late.
Having recently (barely) graduated from Cambridge, Darwin is looking for a way to get out of his father's insistence that he join the clergy, and gets the job of resident naturalist largely because he's the only applicant - although as his mentor (Andrew Bridgmont) points out, a young man who hasn't formed his opinions of how the world works yet could be the perfect blank canvas to make some real discoveries. Of course Darwin's theories resulting from this trip would change the entire world's understanding of nature, and The Wider Earth is largely concerned with his encounters with the exotic animals that gave him the idea for Evolutionary Theory (it's a family show, so we don't get to see how he ate most of them as well.)
The show was written for Morton's puppet theatre company Dead Puppet Society* so it's built largely around its visuals, and it's surprising that it takes a full forty minutes for the first puppets to appear - in fact it has something of a plodding start as we get altogether too much focus on preparations for the journey, as well as a perfunctory romance between Darwin and his childhood friend Emma (Melissa Vaughan.) As well as writing and co-designing (with Aaron Barton) the play Morton also directs, and my ususal reservations about writers directing their own work hold true here with a fairly dry, wooden approach that does nothing to disguise the uninspiring dialogue. Fortunately the design elements are clearly the company's strength and once the voyage gets underway the action kicks into gear, the puppets, David Walters and Lee Curran's lighting and Justin Harrison's projections combine with the revolving wooden structure that forms the centrepiece of the set to bring the Pacific to life.
If the action and adventure kept the kids impressively quiet, I was interested in how the story's theme kept coming back to the impact of Darwin's discoveries on his religion. In so much work written or set in Victorian times, most recently The Sweet Science of Bruising, Darwin is spoken of in hushed terms as an iconoclast if not downright heretic, and this play sees him grapple with the fact that a mission largely sold as celebrating the diversity of god's creation is actually disproving his existence - as well as the resistence he's already facing at the very suggestion of this conclusion. His gradual distancing from the church is mirrored in the subplot of Jemmy (Marcello Cruz,) "rescued" from Tierra del Fuego and raised as a Christian with the intention that he go back and convert his people, Jemmy gradually comes to see he's been treated as a pawn‡.
With themes like this and the growing realisation that the British Empire is largely built on slavery, The Wider Earth can't be accused of avoiding difficult topics, even if it does so clumsily at times. It's no masterpiece, but with spectacle for younger viewers and a bit of food for thought for the older ones, it hits the spot as family theatre with just enough to keep everyone's attention.
The Wider Earth by David Morton is booking until the 30th of December at the Natural History Museum.
Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes including interval.
Photo credit: Mark Douet.
*which strikes me as a strange name for a puppet theatre, when the whole point is that you have to make the puppets look alive
‡ was I the only one mentally shouting "kiiiiiiiss!" every time Darwin and Jemmy had a scene together? I mean yes, obviously I was, but in my defence Cruz is very attractive
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