Darwin, the young dreamer

A review of Wider Earth, playing at the Natural History Museum until 24 February 2019 by Nat Dyer

David Morton’s play, Wider Earth, is advertised as ‘family-friendly’ and has puppets but it is also of great interest to some of the big questions of our time. What it really portrays is the dawning in one young person’s mind of a new understanding of life and the twilight of a religious age.

The first play in a new, purpose-built theatre in London’s Natural History Museum, a few steps away from its world-famous Great Hall, Wider Earth shows a dramatically different Darwin to the common image. Looking out the skeleton of an enormous diving whale suspended in the Hall, is a statue of the grandfather of evolutionary theory as we usually see him: old, bearded, bald with a serious look. In the play, we see a starry-eyed 22-year-old Darwin with a head full of dreams and passion to see the world. It retells the story of the young naturalist’s five-year circumnavigation of the globe on a small ship, the Beagle, and his even more extraordinary intellectual voyage.

Wider Earth shows a dramatically different Darwin to the common image: a starry-eyed 22-year-old with a head full of dreams and passion to see the world.

We follow Darwin in his student days rejecting the bluster and bribery of his authoritarian father who tried to coerce him into becoming a clergyman. How fortunate that Darwin resisted! His father genuinely told the 16-year-old Charles, “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family”. That dialogue is used in the play, adding to its authentic feel. Here is Darwin the young dreamer desperate to see the world he has only read about in books, and we cheer him along as he wins a place on the voyage that would define the rest of his life.

The actors clamber over a revolving, jagged structure on stage which passes as the ship’s cabin, a mountain, and Darwin’s home among other things. Behind them, large screens chart the Beagles’s progress down the coast of South America and over to the Galapagos and recreate storms, fire, and tropical rainforests. The seven-person cast bring to life the animals and insects that Darwin captures and studies with ingenious puppetry. With short scenes and the revolving stage the action moves quickly

There is love interest and a dusting of politics – Darwin and the captain of the Beagle clash over slavery – but the heart of the story is in charting the rise of the modern evolutionary understanding of the origins and diversity of life, and the ebbing away of the power of the Biblical creation story.

A child’s reading of the words of Genesis opens the play, and the rest charts what the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold called the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the sea of religious faith. Missionaries on board try in vain to convert local, indigenous groups they brand “savages”. You see Darwin look deeper into the history of rocks and life than anyone before, and struggle with whether he should carry his thoughts to their logical conclusions. Is there room for God if man evolved? Could Darwin ever share his evolutionary bombshell with the world? This is not the normal science of specialists building out small advances, but revolutionary science on the largest scale: great leaps of understanding with enormous cultural, and philosophical, implications which we are still working out.

In Europe in 2019 it’s easy to believe that religion is an antiquated and spent force in the world, but that’s an optical illusion based on geography. The world outside Europe is still highly religious: China’s Christian population is booming and 84% of the world’s population identify with a faith. We often look askance at the prevalence of creationist thinking in the USA and it’s true: a 2017 poll by Pew Research showed that more people (34%) believe that humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time than those (33%) who believe that humans and other living things evolved solely due to natural processes. But in some Latin American countries even more, up to four-in-ten people, say they believe the literal Biblical story over the scientific one. The debate has only recently begun in the Islamic world.

The awkward compromise between science and religious faith, occasionally shattered by people like Richard Dawkins, will not hold forever: we need a new vision.

More scientific education alone is not the answer. The feeling that accepting evolutionary thinking means the world is not infused with awe and wonder, that people are not special but the result of brutal, selfish competition and chance – as some neo-Darwinians see it – haunts many people. The awkward compromise between science and religious faith, occasionally shattered by people like Richard Dawkins, will not hold forever: we need a new vision.

It may come out of new revolutions in biological thinking that continue to overturn our conception of life: from horizontal gene transfer (genes can jump between species and whole kingdoms of life) to epigenetics (living cells can switch genes on and off). Or by reaching back to Darwin’s view of the “grandeur” of his view of evolution and life. It will not come from fundamentalists on either side of the debate.

In the play, the young Darwin is encouraged by a kindly tutor at Cambridge with an optimistic message for dreamers of new worldviews. “Small things can change the world”, he says, “nothing worthwhile comes easily”.

The great theories of science can often seem intimidating, impersonal forces: Wider Earth shows the human drama behind one of the biggest of all – and it has puppets.

Photo credit above: Trustees of the Natural History Museum