[theatre] 'The Voyage of Charles Darwin'
Saturday, February 21st, 2009 03:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tamaranthSedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, Cambridge
Written and performed by Geoff Hales, this is a monologue set in 1858: Darwin, ageing and plagued by ill-health, receives a letter from Alfred Russell Wallace which spurs reminiscences about his great voyage on HMS Beagle.
This was the first performance and I think Hales could do with more interaction with props: the desk in front of him was covered in intriguing things, but apart from the letters he merely gestured at a chunk of lava. That said, it was an interesting hour's edutainment: plenty of direct quotation from Darwin (who, yes, did call the flightless birds in South America 'ostriches': I was just reading about it in National Geographic) and a sense of Darwin the man -- sickly, his faith lost, loath to publish, fascinated by barnacles.
Nostalgic to sit in an old-fashioned lecture theatre, wooden desk in front of me scored with illegible graffiti, staring at institution-green walls and wondering why the computer monitor on the desk was switched on (it was covered with a cloth, but the light from the ?screensaver reflected on Hales' face.)
Written and performed by Geoff Hales, this is a monologue set in 1858: Darwin, ageing and plagued by ill-health, receives a letter from Alfred Russell Wallace which spurs reminiscences about his great voyage on HMS Beagle.
This was the first performance and I think Hales could do with more interaction with props: the desk in front of him was covered in intriguing things, but apart from the letters he merely gestured at a chunk of lava. That said, it was an interesting hour's edutainment: plenty of direct quotation from Darwin (who, yes, did call the flightless birds in South America 'ostriches': I was just reading about it in National Geographic) and a sense of Darwin the man -- sickly, his faith lost, loath to publish, fascinated by barnacles.
Nostalgic to sit in an old-fashioned lecture theatre, wooden desk in front of me scored with illegible graffiti, staring at institution-green walls and wondering why the computer monitor on the desk was switched on (it was covered with a cloth, but the light from the ?screensaver reflected on Hales' face.)
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Date: Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 01:19 am (UTC)"fascinated by barnacles"
He wasn't fascinated by them -- the relevant quote was (approx) "There's no man in the world hates a barnacle more than I do."
The classification of them was one of those things he took on because that's what zoologists did. He soon came to regard it as a millstone.
(Says me, wot's all knowledgable coz he read Tim Berra's mini-bio of the man just two or three weeks ago.)