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Showing posts with label Natural History Museum. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Natural History Museum. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 24, 2018
Wednesday, October 24, 2018
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Reviewed by David James
Rating:
The image of Charles Darwin is set in stone. Bushy eyebrows, an impressive white beard, a bald head and a thoughtful and serious gaze. Even portrayals of his famous voyage on the HMS Beagle tend to depict him like this, as if he was born, lived and died an old man.
But Darwin was just 22 when the ship departed from Plymouth, and Dead Puppet Society's The Wider Earth shows us a young Darwin (Bradley Foster) teetering on the edge of greatness. Yet to make a name for himself, he worries that he's wasting the opportunity this voyage provides and, when he does begin to tease out the threads that comprise his famous theory, he's terrified of their implications.
Though David Morton's script isn't necessarily aimed at children, this is a broadly educational play about Darwin and the Imperial society that he lived in. While the narrative is, for the most part, a straight A-B story consisting of the preparation of the Beagle's journey, the journey itself and then the return home, the characters are almost always engaged in philosophical and political debates.
Darwin and the crew argue with one another about the British Empire's tolerance of slavery and efforts to abolish it, the place of Christianity within society, the morality of Empire, the importance of reasoned debate and whether truth in and of itself is an ideal to be pursued. It's not dense theory, but I've got to give the show credit for refusing to underestimate children's willingness to engage with political and ethical issues.
I particularly enjoyed the way the show dealt with religion. While it opens with a prayer and every single character (including Darwin) believes in God, the show is almost casually postchristian.
The Wider Earth treats the voyage of the Beagle as a protracted labour in which the modern world struggles to be born, with Darwin cast as midwife. Characters representing the old world like Captain FitzRoy (Jack Parry-Jones) are so culturally immersed in racism that they cannot perceive it, while dogmatic religious types like missionary Richard Matthews (Ian Houghton) aren't treated as antagonists but rather unfortunate people who are unable to perceive the truth of nature.
From a contemporary perspective it's difficult to imagine the huge cultural shift caused by accepting evolution. The theory kicked out the foundations of man's importance on the planet, rendering us 'just' another animal. And, as the play's characters quickly realise, if Darwin is right, it would mean that slavery is an abomination (as all men are inherently equal), that God does not have a plan for us (if he even exists at all), that the concept of the soul is just wishful thinking and that chaos reigns in the universe.
The characters appear to understand (and react with varying levels of horror) that Darwin's thinking represents the moment the tide begins recede for Christianity. It's still receding today, with most Christians (consciously or unconsciously) treating the Bible less like the unquestioned word of God and more like a collection of allegories and aphorisms to live by - that or just a feeble attempt to convince themselves that they are important in a vast, uncaring universe.
Morton neatly serves up a few metaphors of what's going on in these character's minds. The missionary sees the land he intends to convert reject him in a deadly firestorm that sends him retreating to the safety of the ship. Meanwhile, Captain FitzRoy, whose mission is to accurately chart what he believes is God's static creation, has a crisis of faith when he sees volcanoes and earthquakes transforming the Earth before his eyes. His goal is to precisely chart the world as it is and always will be - and realising that this is impossible nearly breaks him.
(Incidentally, it's a bit of a sick joke that Captain FitzRoy regains his confidence only when Darwin explains that his research may prove the existence of God and that the Beagle is therefore on a holy mission, only for his Captaincy actually being key to delivering a fatal blow to the divine jugular. But then he's a big ol' racist imperialist so nuts to him.)
I don't know if any of the 10 or 11-year-olds in the audience will be excitedly discussing the philosophical and cultural death of God in the playgrounds the next day. But the ideas within The Wider Earth play are so concisely and clearly communicated that they will inevitably one day bear fruit.
All that is the satisfying filling inside this theatrical sandwich, but the bread is good too. The revolving set easily conjures up locations from tropical islands to the stuffy offices of a Cambridge don, the rear projections are well-produced, the score is great and the cast doesn't put a foot wrong.
Funnily though, the animal puppets - billed as a major reason to see the show - don't actually play that big a role. They're either used to mask scene changes or in a handful of scenes where they interact with Darwin. They're nice enough to look at, but if you go into this expecting two hours of fun on-stage animals you're going to be disappointed.
It leaves this as a pretty damn cerebral kid's show. While the surface is a boy's own adventure story it carries a payload of ideas that are as striking now as they were when Darwin first thought them up. If you ever needed an argument that one idea can change the world, The Wider Earth provides it.
The Wider Earth is at the Natural History Museum until December 30. Tickets here.
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
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Early man? Early me more like. Bleary-eyed and reduced to emitting a series of guttural grunts I stumbled into the Natural History Museum at just past 8am on Friday morning. The exhibition I'd been invited to, Britain: One Million Years of the Human Story, charts the history of the various brands of human that have inhabited this rainy little island. The exhibition takes four or five rooms to get from a shambling, barely literate simian subhuman to bright-eyed and bushy tailed homo sapiens. I did it in just four cups of strong black coffee - not too shabby.
The exhibition begins with one of those scary timelines that make you feel rather insignificant. Geological timelines show modern humans as a tiny slice at the end of a vast ocean of history. This timeline 'merely' charts the known history of humans on the British Isles and the emergence of modern man is still a tiny chunk at the end. You and every single person you've ever heard of just a tiny spark in the raging forest fire of life.
It sends shivers down your spine right? Throughout the exhibition this immense weight of time presses upon you. Care is taken to align us with our ancestors, forcing us to imagine ourselves as prehistoric men and women, to associate their desires, fears and needs with our own. Much of this is done through subtly clever writing and visual displays. Nearly all of the descriptive signs are written in nicely poetic present tense;
"The vast open grasslands are dotted with wildflowers, and horses graze in the sun. A group of robust humans cluster around a dead rhinoceros, carving it up with their hand-axes. Women, children and men, everyone takes part. In the distance, hyenas are sniffing the air, attracted by the smell of blood."
Similarly, while it's relatively common knowledge that hippopotamuses once wallowed in Trafalgar Square, it's striking to be confronted with a wall-size photographic mock-up showing these prehistoric beasts stalking the frontage of the National Gallery. Obvious care has been taken to place us within the continuity of human history, to understand us as the logical extension of their cave-dwelling, flint-knapping, mammoth-hunting lives.
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| homo neanderthalensis |
One of the things I find most intriguing about the development of modern man is the idea of different species of human living alongside each other. We know for a fact that homo neanderthalensis and homo sapiens co-existed; many of us carry the evidence in our cells, a cheeky slice of Neanderthal sneaking in alongside our homo sapiens DNA - meaning one of our ancestors way back when had a refreshingly open mind when it came to getting their bone on.
It's difficult to imagine a human society that contained two distinct species of mankind, each with their own skills and weaknesses. After all, we have enough problems with racial discrimination as it is even though we're all pretty much genetically identical to each other. Who can say how you'd react to meeting a person who really did think in a different way to you? It seems inevitable that there was violent inter-species conflict; tribes of slender homo sapien squaring off against the stocky Neanderthals for territory, food or just simply because they didn't like the look of them.
You can see this mutual suspicion in the centrepiece of the exhibition; two specially commissioned waxworks stand, tacitly acknowledging each others presence. The Neanderthal hands clasped insouciantly behind his back, a challenging and cheeky expression etched into the crags of his face has a weird charm to him. If you passed this guy in the street you might think in passing that he looked a bit odd, but there's nothing too alien about him.
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| homo sapiens |
Surprisingly, it's the homo sapiens who looks weirder. He's got that creased, stretched, leathery look to him that you see in guys who started raving in the mid-90s and never stopped - a constant fixture at the back of festival tents to this day. With a twig contemplatively popped between his teeth, he peers at us through a dismissive squint, as if examining his descendants and finding us wanting. Despite these two men being genetically separate species, they obviously have far more in common with each other than they do with our pudgy, cosseted, moisturised 21st century selves.
The waxworks are magnificent creations, constructed with precision, artistry and so much humanity that you half expect them to step down from their display and wander off into the Kensington Streets in search of an auroch to slay. But these guys aside, the exhibition doesn't have that much new stuff to offer. Some of the prehistoric skeletons on display will be familiar to anyone who knows the Natural History Museum's collection, and there's the occasional slightly tatty looking bit of taxidermy on display that feels a little cheap in a paid exhibition. There's also a hell of a lot of flints here; and while I recognise the importance of these artefacts there's no getting away from the fact that they're all largely identical.
The exhibition finishes with a bizarre picture of an imaginary future city with organic buildings floating around the streets and a video of various celebrities talking about what their genetic heritage means to them, a neat enough idea but one that contains some rather eye-rolling statements. Bill Bailey, who is usually pretty on the ball, draws a parallel between his ancestor's millennia-long migrations across Europe and his personal sense of ambition. It's a nice thought, but it feels a touch wishy-washy after so much precise science.
Despite all that the chance to get up close and personal with these two great waxworks makes it largely worthwhile. It's a reminder of the infinite ways there are to 'be' a human being; whether from an extinct species, born into a chaotic hunter-gatherer lifestyle or walking around modern London, smartphone clutched in sweaty paw.
Britain: One Million Years of the Human Story is on display until the 28th September 2014, ticket £9 adults, £4.50 concessions.
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Sunday, July 15, 2012
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I've been writing a lot about anatomy lately. It seems that much like buses, exploded physiques, annotated musculatures and preserved parts of corpses seem to come along in groups. Appropriately, I've been progressing through them roughly chronologically starting with the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, to the dusty and mysterious bones of 'Bison to Bedlam' and 'Buried on Campus', and now to the plastinated creatures of 'Animal Inside Out'.
The Natural History Museum, even on a busy Saturday at the height of tourist season, is always a wonderful place to visit. Passing through the front doors and being greeted by the breathtakingly majestic Diplodocus skeleton makes me feel like a child again. I could easily spend a whole day wandering around the different galleries, but time was relatively short yesterday and I made a beeline for 'Animal Inside Out'.
The exhibition is the latest project from Dr Gunter von Hagens' 'Bodyworlds' workshop. They are famous for their various touring exhibitions which showcase plastinated human bodies in a variety of poses and in various states of assembly. The plastination process is a revolutionary way of displaying preserved bodies - water and fat are replaced by various plastics which allows the texture and shape of organic material to be retained, leaving a specimen which doesn't smell or decay. The applications in teaching are obvious, but the results are so striking that the touring exhibitions regularly sell-out worldwide. This exhibition is the first time that this process has been applied to the animal kingdom, with impressive results.
One of the first things that strikes you as you enter the exhibition is the atmosphere. It feels more like an art gallery than a museum. This exhibition apparently aims to educate more than appeal to aesthetics, but it's hard not to get swept up in the beauty of the exhibits rather than coolly examining them with a scientific eye. You're first confronted with a large bisected squid, and a blood red shark. Both of these, the shark especially, are a bit sensorialy overwhelming - and rather than trying to analyse I found myself admiring them primarily as beautiful objects. The shark in particular is stunning, posed and lit expertly, the red of its capillaries seeming to glow in the spotlight it sits in. It contrasts the obvious power of the animal with a fragility implied through complexity. The life of this shark, as all organisms, relies on an infinitely complex set of biological machinery that is almost impossible to comprehend visually.
This first room is dedicated to aquatic specimens, and sets the template for the rest of the exhibition. There are 3 or 4 'superstar' specimens - full plastinations of creatures that highlight a particular aspect of their anatomy - and a series of smaller display cases that showcase smaller plastinations and individual organs from animals.
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| Plastinated Ostriches |
Very quickly you notice that they are quite economical with information. The information panels tend to tell you what the interesting features are in a few sentences, with maybe a small piece of trivia. Ordinarily I prefer to have as much information as possible available during an exhibition, but here less is more. The specimens tend to speak for themselves, and the way in which they're laid out or 'exploded' tells us more than paragraphs of signage ever could. It's refreshing that in a top summer exhibition we're allowed to draw our own conclusions about what we're looking at, rather than being directly told.
As you progress through the exhibition, the specimens gradually become more and more impressive. Every time you round a corner, what is behind it tops what has come before. The first full plastinated mammals we see are sheep and goats, and it's here that you begin to appreciate the importance of plastination as a teaching aid. Whilst there are omnipresent signs warning us not to touch the exhibits, we are allowed to get as close to them as we went. If you want to bend down and look into the intestines of a sheep then you are able, indeed, the way they are exhibited seems to invite this closer scrutiny. In most instances, you are able to view the animals from any angle, you're free to move around them and examine whatever takes your fancy.
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| Plastinated horses head showing the coverage of capillaries. |
One of the most fascinating exhibits in this section was a trisected horse's head, cut lengthways. These types of 'split' plastinations were among my favourites; they allow you to see the mechanics of how everyone fits together and (somewhat uniquely for an anatomical display) how tightly packed together anatomy is. Generally, for purposes of comprehension, anatomical systems are usually displayed in a somewhat simplified form - we are able to easily distinguish between different colour-coded organs, and nervous and circulatory systems are portrayed as diagrammatic. What you begin to appreciate here is how complicated and 'busy' internal anatomy is. Everything is packed tightly together, and is generally the same colour. You'd think it'd be easy to spot major features like the spinal cord, or the brain, but it's far from immediately obvious.
Another way in which the exhibition succeeds is to show us the animal 'in motion'. One of the most dramatic instances is the bull plastination. The animal seems frozen in mid-frenzy, about to charge forward and gore anyone in its path. The exposed muscles along the flank of are taut and tense, and everything seems to suggest a fluid sense of motion and power. This is another example of an instance in which we do not need any more information provided than what we can see before us. The pose provides all the context we need. The sheer size of this model, the largest we've seen so far is also impressive, and sets the stage for what's to come.
Passing reindeer in motion, we're able to see precisely how the the muscles high up in the body provide the energy for the slender legs below - allowing the quick acceleration that it relies upon to escape from wolves. We move to a small display case showing models of the circulatory systems of a duck, a rabbit, a pig and a lamb. These, as beautiful as they are, seem like a bit of a climb down after the bull, but then you turn the corner and are face-to-face with the colossal elephant plastination.
The elephant is probably the single best anatomical exhibit I have ever seen. It's both astoundingly aesthetically appealing and a stunningly clear way of presenting information. It's hard to think of a better way to convey the sheer mass of the creature than this. The head and trunk are neatly split in two, allowing us to peer through the head and through the neck to the internal organs. From the side we can see it's huge guts, the flesh separated from the body creating a sort of cocoon for them. The muscles of the legs are shown flowering outwards from the bone, showing both their individual beauty and how they all fit together. Below, the nervous system has been separated and laid out roughly in relation to the body above. It is relatively easy to imagine the plastination processes of the smaller animals, but it boggles the mind how the elephant has been created. It's the kind of exhibit you could appreciate for hours from every angle. Alas, the museum was closing, and I had to leave.
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| Circulatory system of a rabbit. |
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| Whoa Nellie! |
This exhibition costs £9 to enter, and it's worth every penny of it. A huge amount of thought has been put into the layout, presentation and lighting. Each area builds on the one before, and complements the one to come, adding layers upon layers of context to what we are seeing. If I had some minor criticisms, then it'd be that we do not get to see any large carnivore plastinations. I suppose this is a function of the fact that all the animals featured have died naturally - nothing has been killed for the exhibition - and I suppose a lion or tiger carcass is a hot commodity amongst zoologists. This is exactly the kind of exhibition that the Natural History Museum should be putting on, a perfect mix of information and aesthetics that you can't help but walk out of with a renewed appreciation of the aesthetics, beauty and complexity of anatomy.
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