Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [42]
But ten minutes before show time, a group of twenty or thirty cruise ship passengers arrived, with a tour director in tow. They seated themselves at a long table and ordered pre-performance Argentine wines. As waiters brought the wine, a few actors in what some costume designer evidently imagined to be a nineteenth century sailor outfit—with their wide-brimmed floppy baker’s hats and silver-blue neckties, they looked more like Parisian pastry chefs—emerged and pretended to swab the decks.
Before the violins could strike up a seventh chorus of the Coronation Anthem, the cruise ship passengers rose in unison at a signal from their tour director and shuffled through a curtain in the back of the Beagle replica. I followed them onto the ship, where the rising part of the rear cabin had been converted into seats. I climbed up and found one near the top, looking down at the deck planks and the sail-less main mast. My view also encompassed Tierra del Fuegian scenery, in this case glaciers made of crinkly white fabric draped over a metal framework. The ship sat in the middle of a big-top-style tent, and the black walls, with inset starry lights, rose high overhead.
Then everything went dark. The audience went quiet. The production began with a small video screen showing—what else?—Darwin as an old man in his study, recounting the origins of the voyage in a frail, Argentine-accented voice. And then, suddenly, our hero appeared in the flesh, emerging from a door in the Beagle’s fore cabin dressed in a long corduroy jacket, long red pants, and a pink shirt, and carrying what looked to be a rusty red suitcase emblazoned with flowers. The actor’s costume appeared to be loosely based on a portrait of Darwin at age thirty-one, wearing a brown shooting jacket, with a blue vest underneath—the cut of the actor’s jacket was similar, even if the color was off. The actor himself had long, straight hair, dyed blond with visible dark roots, and worn in an unruly mop. Synthetic muttonchops were glued to his cheeks.
Soon, the squadron of sailors that had earlier been pretend-swabbing the deck appeared, and then an appropriately costumed FitzRoy and another officer, and then, as Monty Python might say, things got silly. They broke out in song, in English. The lyrics, transcribed on the “boarding agreement,” read:
We’ll fight the roaring seas
We shall face no defeat
All across the Seven Seas
The Beagle will succeed.
When the sailors finished singing and stomped off to work, Darwin and FitzRoy took center stage for a duet about searching for truth (in Darwin’s case) and the work of the Lord (in FitzRoy’s case). The lyrics—Darwin: “I’ll listen to the calling of the Earth,” FitzRoy: “uncover all of nature’s divine perfection and more”—played on two falsehoods, the first being that Darwin had any kind of coherent conception of his theory of evolution by natural selection before, or even really during, the Beagle’s voyage. (Mostly, he had inklings that something wasn’t right with the traditional explanation for the origins of life, which held that all species were created exactly as they were and did not change.) The second untruth was that FitzRoy wanted Darwin along to prove the literal truth of the Bible.
The musical, in fact, continued to hammer that point home, portraying FitzRoy as an overbearing fundamentalist blowhard, unwilling to tolerate dissent on religious matters. It staged Darwin as a tormented evolutionist, torn between his friendship with the captain and the new scientific truths he was discovering. If this theme wasn’t evident from, say, the twenty-foot-tall dancing sloth fossil that sang to Darwin that “you can try to deny what your eyes meet . . .