Playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker returns to her core themes of myth, storytelling and exile, writes Arminta Wallace.
Timberlake Wertenbaker: it's a name to conjure with. It's also, when attached to a piece of theatre, a guarantee that the said piece of theatre will stir up considerable intellectual debate and - though it may be amusing, even hilarious - pack a serious political punch.
Wertenbaker made her name on the British stage in the 1980s with a trio of new plays for the Royal Court Theatre in London: The Grace of Mary Traverse, Our Country's Good and Three Birds Alighting on a Field.
Ideas have always been her chief currency as a dramatist, and they come to the fore with particular force in her 1988 play After Darwin, which received its Irish première at Project in Dublin this week.
Though the play examines the collision between the traditional Judeo-Christian view of creation and Darwin's theory of evolution, After Darwin is primarily a drama about real people. "I'm not interested in pure ideas," says Wertenbaker, on the phone from her home in the French Basque country. "I'm interested in people, in characters. But of course characters have ideas, and these ideas create passions. What really interests me is the conflict of passions.
"I've always been interested in Darwin, particularly The Voyage of the 'Beagle', because I've always liked travel writing. Through reading that I became very interested in his character, and what he discovered. Then I read a lovely essay by Stephen Jay Gould on the conflict between Darwin and the captain of the 'Beagle', Robert Fitzroy and that got me interested in Fitzroy."
In dramatic terms, she says, what fascinates her is the way the relationship between the two men changed during their five-year voyage to the Galapagos Islands.
"When they set out, Fitzroy was this very young, very glamorous captain from a very good Anglo-Irish family; whereas Darwin was a sort of ne'er-do-well, really. In fact, he hadn't even done anything very much. He started medicine and pulled out, he was the despair of his father, and so on. As the voyage proceeded, Fitzroy was stuck on the boat mapping the coast of South America inch by inch, practically - and a very, very bleak coast at that - while Darwin was able to go off and travel. Then, as he became more independent, he began to get notions of the theory of evolution.
"Fitzroy was very religious, almost a Christian fundamentalist, and was quite frightened of Darwin's theories. So it was a relationship which started one way and then transformed itself and, to some extent, destroyed Fitzroy in the end."
Despite her interest in the two historical protagonists Wertenbaker chose to place After Darwin in our own time, with Millie, a Bulgarian immigrant, discovering a play called Darwin and deciding to stage a new production of it. Did Wertenbaker use this play-within-a-play structure because she felt contemporary audiences would need a modern take on the historical setting? "It was that, yes," she says. "But what also interested me is that the theory of evolution has had quite serious consequences for the way we think about ourselves. We've never quite recovered from it.
"There's a kind of misunderstanding that it's about the survival of the fittest, whereas in fact it's about the survival of a whole species." Wertenbaker is convinced humanity's obsession with the "survival of the fittest" angle of evolution has had a detrimental long-term effect on moral development.
"It seems to me that because of the theory of evolution - because of our failure to understand that there's something else in human beings, which is humanity, we find it very hard to deal with ethical questions," she says.
"I was also quite influenced by Richard Dawkins and his wonderful chapter which argues that although human beings aren't evolving physically any more, they are evolving culturally. I think a lot of people are trying to find a way to see how human beings should function, knowing that it's no longer about God and the hierarchy and doing well in order to get to heaven, so to speak. I think we're still working on that one. That's why I thought it important to bring the modern element into the play."
For someone so articulate about the evolution of the species, Wertenbaker is curiously offhand about her own evolution as a writer. She grew up in the French Basque country and describes her background as "Anglo-American-French", but as to how she got interested in writing for theatre . . . you can practically hear the Anglo-American-French shrug winging its way north-westwards along the phone line.
"Oh, I don't know, really. Possibly, early on, because it's a very oral culture down here. I grew up in a very small village and people told stories all the time. When I look back on it, I think that had something to do with it. And then, as happens, I suddenly . . . I mean, I was writing, and then suddenly I was writing plays. And," she offers as an afterthought, "I liked the collaborative aspect of theatre very much."
Which may explain why Wertenbaker has done so many translations, of Greek classics on the one hand - Sophocles and Euripides - and French classical drama - Maeterlinck and Marivaux - on the other. Does she approach translation as an exercise? A penance, maybe? "No, no," she says, laughing. "It's actually the next best thing to acting in somebody else's plays since I'm not an actress. It's a terrific way to get to know another writer from the inside."
At the moment Wertenbaker is working on an adaptation of Dava Sobel's book Galileo's Daughter; she's also making a radio adaptation of a book by an Albanian novelist who, like herself, lives in France. "It's a fantastic novel," she says. "It's about the Balkans. It's about . . . well, no. Actually it's about Homer."
Myth, storytelling, exile: these are themes Wertenbaker certainly seems to warm to. And, of course, the Darwin story has a mythic dimension too, in that it dramatises the collision of a scientific discovery with an age-old story - the Bible story as recounted in Genesis.
Does she believe stories and myths are as powerful, in their own way, as hard scientific fact? "Well, this is Fitzroy's argument," she says. "Not that he was a flat-earther, I have to say. I think for him it had to do with order and disorder. The theory of evolution describes a very disordered, chaotic world. It's also a somewhat random world. It's all about chance, when we really want destiny. In fact, we don't know whether we live with chance or with destiny, and this affects us personally very much. It certainly affects the characters in the play."
So, does After Darwin come to any conclusions about the rights and wrongs of religious arguments versus scientific ones? "None," is Wertenbaker's prompt reply. "Except that if all of these things can live together in some way, then there's hope. You know, that it doesn't have to be either or: Darwin or Fitzroy; science or imagination; inclusivity rather than exclusivity. That's what the very last scene of the play is about."
Like the play itself this finale revolves around the central character, Millie - who, like many of Wertenbaker's women characters, has become something of a displaced person. In what way? "Er, because," says her creator, "she's, um. Ah. Well, you'll see. It's a bit of a surprise. Otherwise I'll give away the plot. . ."
Prime Cut Theatre Company's production of Timberlake Wertenbaker's After Darwin, directed by Jackie Doyle and featuring Sean Francis, Conleth Hill, Des McAleer and Norma Sheahan, is at Project, in Dublin, until May 3rd, followed by the Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast, from May 12th to 17th.