In 2009 the entire world will celebrate the bicentenary from the birth of the scientist who changed so radically our point of view on the origin of mankind and of the environment we live in: CHARLES DARWIN.

Timos Teatro Eventi presented last May at the most prestigious and representative cultural centre in Rome, the AUDITORIUM PARCO DELLA MUSICA, a play inspired to Darwin’s autobiography, letters, notes and works. The play reconstructs the reasons and the steps of one of the most meaningful thought revolutions on the origin of mankind and of the environment humans live in.

The play is based on the reconstruction of some stages of Darwin’s 5-year-long incredible journey around the world, on board of the Beagle vessel, lead by captain Fitz Roy. The play starts with a flashback of the old and white-haired Charles Darwin, thinking back over his extraordinary life. However, memory is not a linear tale and, most importantly, memory is not only made up of words, but also of sudden images, unexpected analogies, insights and sound surprises. The staging, therefore, comes out of a masterly interweaving between the text and a composition of video and sound sequences linking the theme of the boundary between thought and vision, flash and time duration, image and thought, philosophy and science, representation and speculation.

The plot, cohesive and consistent with the contemporary thought, escapes the flatness of narrative or temporal linearity, through a selection of autobiographical and epistolary fragments, that are narratively effective and crucial for the understanding of the protagonist’s thought. Darwin is presented as a lively character, concerned with the most concrete and exasperating problems of his time, like the pressure received from his father, who wanted him to become a clergyman, and the “hysterical passion” of the captain of the Beagle, Fitz Roy, whose tragic inability to understand the Theory of Evolution, lead him to weaken Darwin’s morale by accusing him of being arrogant, but also the creative and vital energy of Darwin’s youth, his successive marriage, the bitter thoughts on the hampering reactions of the establishment and of Church, the “thinking ahead” the Science of the future, and the people who would succeed Darwin in the mine-field at the boundary between scientific and religious truth. On the whole, the text puts together the traces of an adventure of ideas like Darwin’s, in a time when geographic exploration and audacious conjectures vividly interweave with each other and when every single evidence reported by the protagonist gains an extraordinary value, that with lightness, sense of humor, passion and poetry touches the soul and mind of the audience.