Collapsing Creation, a play by Arthur Meek

When I walked to my seat and sat down facing the set at Downstage Theatre, Wellington, I experienced such disappointment that I complained about it to my husband during the entire 10 min before the show started:  the set was far too white, Victorians would have neither white curtains nor white window-frames in a gentleman's study, the carpet was insipid, the furniture boring, beige and tired, the only picture a lone ancestor in a heavy frame. At some point in all this whingeing, a thought did run quickly through the back of my mind that there might be a reason for the blank walls, should one trust that they knew what they were doing, but the complaining was stronger.

From the moment the play started, I forgot about all that and was riveted. The movement on the stage was so dynamic, so expressive of what the characters were feeling, they were so original and natural in their interactions that I was delighted and fascinated. I have rarely enjoyed a play as much. I found I now liked the set, the roominess which gave the characters plenty of scope, the blank walls which became screens onto which people's shadows or luminescent colours, - greens and purples, blues and reds, very satisfying hues - were projected. I have often seen Peter Hambleton perform and felt this was one of his best performances - the moment when young  Thomas brings his Big Idea to him and his heart sinks - I felt it viscerally.

The play itself pleased me, oh yes it is pleasing: the humour - how Science, in the shape of an increasingly cringeing but dogged servant,  keeps intruding on Mrs Darwin's intimacy with her husband, the fight she leads to be the One and Only in his life, her battle with his obsession, his respect for hers.  Never does Darwin say what might upset her - that is left to the other protagonists, Roberts, the man of faith and Thomas, the young upstart scientist. Both evolve and change believably and shockingly in the course of the play. Themes are interwoven - reproduction, fecundity, kinship, 'the most important part of a tree', a man's life work, the meaning of children, of religion, publish or be damned, various ambitions, different kinds of intimacy, and love and trust, hope and despair.

I think it must become a classic.

Of human nature

Finished Allen Curnow's book last night and found to my delight that he has added notes at the end of the book which refer to the poems - not all of them, but then not all of them need explaining (in my view).

And one of the Notes is about St. Babel - a 200 m tower built by the immigrants who first arrived in Christchurch. The colonists of Shinar Curnow refers to were the original builders of Babel, Genesis Chapters 10 and11, he adds helpfully, so looked at the source, and to my surprise found in verse 10:10 - that Babel was built by Nimrod, son of Cush, son of Noah, the surprise being because Nimrod is a positive Biblical figure "... a mighty hunter before the Lord ..." (from the Soncino translation) "Tsaiad gibor lifnei Adonai".

And in chapter 11 verses 8 and 9: "So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth ; and they left off (veYachdelu) from building the city (my translation, Soncino too Victorian) Therefore was it called Babel, because the Lord did there confound (confuse?) the language of all the earth...

Curnow establishes a parallel with the people who arrived in the Canterbury Plains in 1850, 'shaped by a long voyage in unknown waters'. The tower was to 'make us a name, lest we be scattered'. The poem ends neatly - the church man loves the bells, his companion hates the racket they make, those damned bells, which prevent him from hearing what the other has to say...

Watched a documentary on DVD, a lengthy and fascinating interview with Robert McNamara - The Fog of War by Errol Morris. Found it by chance, it had won an Oscar, Academy Award winner in 2003 for best documentary. McNamara is 85, and reviews his eventful life - sometimes tearfully. He was Secretary of Defence under Kennedy and Johnson. The interview is structured around his conclusions about life and how to live, some of which may seem a bit naive, surprisingly. One of them is "Human nature does not change". Which connects back to Curnow's poem.

Another surprise: the poison tree! It appears again - Curnow writes four poems after Pushkin, and the Upas Tree is one of them, the original being published in 1828. Curnow surmises that "...the story of the 'celebrated poison-tree of Macasser' could have reached Pushkin by way of Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of the more famous Charles)...From 15 to 18 miles round this tree...no living animal of any kind has been discovered." The original tree was supposedly in Java, Pushkin transplants it to the steppes. Curnow ends his Note with: "... A modern dictionary ...correctly mentions its 'poisonous milky sap', also indicated by its scientific name Antiaris toxicaria, and its known use for poisoned arrows." (p. 51)