The legendary exploits of naturalist Charles Darwin aboard the HMS Beagle will be re-envisioned by Dead Puppet Society in a rare spectacle fusing history with unbridled imagination and contemporary puppetry.
Over three years in development, David Morton’s ‘The Wider Earth’ is coming to life as a stage production which incorporates human actors and a newly evolved form of puppetry. “It’s a hard one to describe because we don’t really play into any of the old school traditions,” David says of the style. “We sometimes talk about it being contemporary bunraku because we borrow a lot of the mechanisms from the Japanese form.
“It’s a form we’ve been working in now for a few years and the thing we really like about it is that we think it makes the show more intensively imaginative. We love mixing actors with puppets because not only do you get to watch an actor being a character, but at the same time you get to watch an actor create life out of a piece of wood. There’s another whole layer of reality that plays in, and we like the way it undoes some of the super earnestness of a traditional theatrical piece.”
Darwin’s famous voyage took him around the world studying and cataloguing species of animals previously unknown to the scientific community. ‘The Wider Earth’ features animals from South Africa, South America, the Galapagos Islands and even Australia presented in spectacular puppet form.
“We’ve got a whole suite of puppets from all of the different places Darwin travelled to on the Beagle,” says Creative Producer Nick Paine. “In terms of the destinations themselves, the show is pretty true to the places he did visit. So from the Galapagos for example we have Galapagos tortoises, a flightless cormorant, two blue-footed boobies – which are big birds with literally blue feet – marine iguanas, whales, platypuses, sharks. You name it, it’s in there.”Darwin’s journey on the Beagle is well-known, particularly for his infamous stoush with the Captain of the Beagle (and second governor of New Zealand), Robert Fitzroy.
“In creating this show we were really clear that we weren’t creating a period historical drama,” David says. “We didn’t want it to feel like a stodgy waistcoats-and-frocks drama. The idea was that we talk constantly of this show being a re-imagining of Charles Darwin’s story, and that it’s a mythologised version.
“The lens we tried to pass it through was going: if all record of Darwin’s work and voyage was lost today, what would people say about it in 100 years? What were the key things that happened? We’ve thrown historical factual detail to the wind and gone with more emotional detail and larger movements.”
As Creative Producer for ‘The Wider Earth’ and also Managing Producing for Dead Puppet Society, Nick says the scale of the production presented unique challenges, especially in engineering the puppets, which themselves are pieces of art.
“Everything began as a sketch and a creature study which most of the time we did with the animals in front of us so we could get to know them,” he says. “Each of the Galapagos tortoises have 200 pieces, each of those pieces are laser-cut and glued together… and then the big challenge was getting them to move from there. They’re basically sculptures with movable parts.”
‘The Wider Earth’ performs Queensland Theatre Company 9 July - 7 August.
