Theatre Review: Gilbert is Dead | Hoxton Hall | Charles Darwin's revolutionary theories | Ronan Vibert | taxidermist

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The Review - THEATRE by JANE MASUMY
Published: 12 November 2009

Gilbert is Dead at Hoxton Hall

Taking aim at Darwin’s theories...

GILBERT IS DEAD
Hoxton Hall

HOW comforting it must have been to have known there was a Kingdom Come where we would be reunited with loved ones.
And how hard it must have been for the Victorians to give up this world view when challenged by Charles Darwin’s revolutionary theories.
Celebrating Darwin’s bicentenary and the 150th anniversary of On The Origin of Species, Robin French’s new drama, set in Victorian England, deals with the breakdown of a belief system and is a tragi-comic take on evolution.
Lucius Trickett (fantastic Ronan Vibert), a London taxidermist and self-pitying widower, refuses to accept Darwin’s theories because he wants to know he will be reunited with his wife in heaven. He neglects his sharp-minded daughter Lucille (Kate Burdett), a wheelchair user, but at the same time traps her between all the stuffed animals considering her unfit for the world.
Christopher Hone’s stage design, complete with real life stuffed pelicans, spiders, a rhinoceros and giraffe and a huge swordfish dangling from the ceiling, reflects wonderfully the stifling and claustrophobic world the young woman has to live in, seeing nobody else but her father, her maid, and her friend Dr Meriweather (William Chubb) who wants to rescue her from “this temple of death” – the dead animals.
Her father is obsessed by the apparent findings of an explorer called Gilbert Shirley who was sent out by Queen Victoria on a mission to find the ghost loris, a monkey creature said to prove Darwin wrong.
Lovingly designed two-dimensional paper puppets similar to those used in Victorian theatre are operated by the actors in dream-like sequences that mark the explorer’s adventures in the wild jungle and are juxtaposed with the dusty feel of the stuffed specimens.
What appears silly with some strikingly funny fighting scenes makes perfect sense at the play’s surprising and sad ending.
Until November 29
020 7684 0060

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