This is an unusual enterprise. The museum’s Jerwood Gallery has been turned into a theatre to house a production by Australia’s Dead Puppet Society, telling the story of Charles Darwin’s five-year-long voyage on HMS Beagle. Written, directed and co-designed by David Morton, it is visually terrific even if the script rarely rises above the level of a schools broadcast.
Morton rightly reminds us that Darwin (played with boyish enthusiasm by Bradley Foster) was only 22 when he was plucked out of Cambridge in 1831 to be the resident naturalist on the Beagle’s historic journey. We also get a hint of the arguments between Darwin and the ship’s captain, Robert FitzRoy, over slavery, colonialism and religion. But the script is more concerned with providing information than drama, and perpetuates the idea that Darwin, through his theory of evolution, single-handedly undermined orthodox faith, whereas the debate between science and religion was longstanding.
What the show does offer is an engrossing spectacle. Using techniques similar to those of the South African Handspring Puppet Company that inspired War Horse, the seven actors manipulate puppets that bring the natural world to life: we get everything from armadillos, cormorants, fireflies and tortoises to a giant fossilised seashell. There are also beautiful painterly projections, the work of Justin Harrison, which whisk us from the rolling Shropshire hills to the fiery shores of Tierra del Fuego and the teeming abundance of the Galápagos Islands. Even if the show is far more sophisticated visually than verbally, it demonstrates that Darwin was always a man of “enlarged curiosity”, and it would make a painless introduction to his discoveries for young audiences.
At the Natural History Museum, London, until 30 December.
