Amanda Niehaus and David Morton
45:20
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Darwin, thought, voyage, puppets, creatures, production, audience, reimagining, felt, world, talking, play, amazing, beagle, Brisbane, people, ship, story.
SPEAKERS
Amanda Niehaus, David Morton
Amanda Niehaus 05:14
David Morton is a writer, director and designer and creative director of the Brisbane-based Dead Puppet Society. For the last 10 years, he's led puppet society and developing collaborative theater works, including Laserbeak Man, Storm Boy, and our main focus for today, The Wider Earth. David has been nominated for five Helpmann awards, and an Olivier Award, which I have learned is extremely prestigious-so congratulations on that! And we are very, very pleased to welcome him to Science Write Now today. Hi, David.
David Morton 05:47
Hi, thank you so much for having me.
Amanda Niehaus 05:50
It's our pleasure. So, could you just start by telling us a bit about your current production, The Wider Earth?
David Morton 05:57
Yeah, absolutely. So The Wider Earth is a reimagining of the life of the young Charles Darwin. So the story follows primarily the five years-ish that he spent on the Beagle, the ship which he was a part of sailing around the world, and the events immediately leading up to and immediately following that voyage. That's sort of the primary story driver behind it.
Amanda Niehaus 06:23
And why, why this part of Darwin's life, like, why this story?
David Morton 06:28
Look, it's actually a fun story. We were - my partner, Nick and I, who also runs our company - in 2012, we were lucky enough to receive some Australia Council funding to undertake a mentorship with our heroes, the Handspring Puppet company, who built the amazing horses for the National Theatre Company production War Horse that sort of was, I think, like, largely responsible for changing the way puppetry was viewed around the globe, in a in a theater space. So we were with them in Cape Town in late 2012. And while we were there, you know, we sort of got talking with Basil and Adrian, the directors of that company. Now we're talking about how, you know, Charles Darwin stopped in Cape Town on his way back in the, you know, the final stages of the voyage of the Beagle around the world and it just came up in conversation that he was only in his mid 20s, when he was in Cape Town.
David Morton 07:19
And Nick and I just sort of both had this moment, we were like, a voyage around the world at that time, couldn't have been a quick one. And in his 20s, he must have been a baby and he put his life on hold, to go on this voyage. And so we went on a bit of a deep dive, and you know, learnt about the university borderline dropout. And the young man who couldn't live up to his family's expectations of becoming a doctor, who, you know, violently didn't want to become a priest or undertake theological training. And who then went on this trip, this life-changing voyage, and came back with profound thoughts that, you know, have influenced the direction of a lot of contemporary thought. And so we were just like, it feels like there's almost a - I don't know I say this with respect - but like a Pixar esque coming of age story hidden in this, you know, that there's this we all know, Darwin is the, you know, the Gent with the long gray beard, thrown in the Natural History Museum. But we were like, ah, there's a character behind this - because what sort of person throws their entire life away to go on on an on a trip like that? I say trip, makes it sound trivial.
Amanda Niehaus 08:37
No I think that's, that's so important. Because everything that we think about Darwin tends to be that sort of older gentleman who's got it all figured out. And, and he didn't have it figured out when he was young. He didn't, he didn't know anything. And that was kind of one of the joys of his character in your show, too, for me, was his kind of earnestness and curiosity about things and like, what happens when he kind of let go of you know the feeling that he needed to sort of be someone more than he already was? And so like, what do you think that the role of openness, I guess, is in in driving discovery or creativity?
David Morton 09:27
Yeah. But I think that speaks to to one of the major reasons why we made this play and also to for you know, your listeners, it's not a new work for us. We first began the writing process on it in like 2013. So it's been around for quite a while. But I think you know, the impulse for us behind this story, in addition to that cool character that we thought deserved a place, or this version of the character, I think was around what it means as an individual to find this clarity of thought or to find the headspace in order to be able to think in a manner that sits outside the dominant paradigms all the time. And, and so, there's a line in the play about, you know, just cheeky, but you know, expertise being overrated and send a young person who knows nothing. And you know, you don't know what they might find. And so I think that that for us was a really important gesture to, you know - we can sometimes get so trapped in existing thought patterns or existing, you know, ways of seeing the world or ways of being in the world and to look at what does it mean for us to break those molds, to allow the thoughts that are actually not that disparate to thoughts that have come before that allow that incremental growth of, of knowledge and which can feed into our collective experience? So, yeah, so for us, that was, yeah, let's send this young sort of lad off on a five year voyage and throw a bunch of different creatures at him and see how it sticks.
Amanda Niehaus 10:55
Yeah, and not just creatures, but people and and like the interactions that that he has on the voyage with different characters, who kind of test different elements of his personality is really important too. Do you think, like, do you think that travel is one of the best ways that we can sort of pull ourselves out of these, these kind of linear paths?
David Morton 11:18
Look, I think, absolutely. And, you know, I think I'm sure, it's something that a lot of people have felt over the last couple of years, you know, as we've all been in various levels of confinement, either to cities or to rooms sometimes, and I think that there's something - it's where the title for the play came from, The Wider Earth - that I think that we all as people have, as human beings, have a responsibility to look outside our own frames of reference and to know that the way we see the world is one way and that there are so many other ways, and there's so many other lived experiences that that, you know, we can engage with. And I think you absolutely hit on it, like, what better way to begin to actually force that for an individual than to be outside - literally - of your comfort zone. And, and with Yeah, humans that think totally differently to you. And, I guess taking this like, you know, minor landed gentry, you know, in in Darwin and putting him number one in a context on a military boat, that he's totally unfamiliar with, you know, it's just one stage of, of how, in our rendering of the story, we tried to break him out of his, his way of being, I think, particularly through the first act, it's like, almost every incident that happens on that ship, and On that voyage is about trying to break down his understandings of the world, and how different people interact within it.
Amanda Niehaus 12:43
Absolutely. And so what was, you know, what was your your process in terms of researching Darwin's life? And and how did you decide what elements you were going to use to drive the narrative of The Wider Earth?
David Morton 12:57
Yes, [ ] question. Yeah, all of our work as Dead Puppet Society - it's always about reimagining or mythologizing. And so I think that we're, you know, and then likewise, all of our work has either a focus on social or ecological justice, like we're really interested in the positioning of narratives that will appeal to a very wide audience, but that hopefully, I don't know, hide material that will provoke conversation or thought, but but that we're definitely not one of those theatre companies that slaps you over the facewit it. But then we'll go, you know, hopefully, you invested enough in this story, that there's a conversation that happens around the dinner table of like, you know, I went and read about Darwin's theories and look at these amazing things, but also look at these incredibly problematic things and, and how and how, you know, we can help to promote that conversation through our work. So the process for us began with a deep dive, like, just read, and like as much as we could possibly read. And we built out this enormous Excel spreadsheet which charted different verbatim quotes from Darwin's various publications, but also from his personal correspondence and his letters. And we mapped them on this timeline, that sort of, it's [ ] his early conversations with his professors, all the way through to some of the letters just prior to his death. And then, sort of within that began to look at what are the primary moments in here that, one, we feel have a visual poetry or that are going to really stand up on a stage and, and two, that speak really strongly to this idea of, of, of trying to form an understanding or trying to form a growth in an idea or in a thought. And so we did that and then naturally, you know, ended up with a suite of characters and time that is far outside of what can be achieved in a, you know, an evening long theatre production. And so I think that's where our, you know, the idea of mythologizing or reimagining for us came in that we will We were like, Well, look, we can, an audience is going to understand the chronological constraints of a voyage. You know, here's this amazing thing that it has a beginning and it has an end. And so what we then started to search for was ways that there were things that were mentioned, either, you know, in the records of the voyage, or in Darwin's journals of the voyage itself, that had a poetic resonance with things that happened later in his life. And so that the show definitely takes the liberty of putting the arrival of thoughts for Darwin into a time frame that is not historically accurate, that does bring it earlier. But I think what I hope what it does for an audience is draw the beginnings of those connections between - here's what he saw, and then yes! the thought that came about as a result of that did happen a decade later and in consultation with other experts in the field, but that, I guess, presented in a manner that offers for a viewer who might be fresh to this material, or is seeking a new perspective on this material, an idea of the cause and effect of how experience can lead to the development of thought. Yeah, I hope that [ ].
David Morton 13:00
Yeah, no. Yeah. Because the voyage, he would have come back from the voyage with all of these kind of seeds of ideas, right, that, that. And I know that like, when I have a big experience, whether it's travel or, you know, family or something. I never know how to write it straightaway. So always, over time, you kind of figure out the frame to sort of put these things into your right.
David Morton 16:32
Totally, yeah. Yeah, it's one of the reasons why in the material, we included the, the voiceover of the of the, you know, the older version of Darwin, so that at least there could be, you know, as you read the piece that I think there could be a degree of openness in its interpretation as to exactly where's the explicit thought landing, you know, and that we can go, you know, bear with us, folks, like a lot of this happened in the future of that story time. But let's think about how those thoughts began. And what the experience was that landed it. But yeah, you're totally right, you know, you need that. background processing time to let stuff sit.
Amanda Niehaus 17:11
Absolutely. And one of the big parts of the the play is, you know, Darwin's journal that he's writing in, and and what happens to this journal? Um, do you know, did he? Did he he publish that journal as it was? Or did he kind of divide that up into different things? Like, how much did he revisit his, his records of the trip later on?
David Morton 17:33
Yeah. So in the, in our dramatized version, there's obviously the, you know, the moment towards the second act, where he's confronted by the gravity of what might happen, both good and bad in the world, if the thoughts that he's had go further, and, you know, we have a moment in our reimagined dramatization where for a moment, he abandons that physical book, and it's a dramatic symbol for the wanting to depart from the thought and to go back to a safe space. And I guess where the hook in reality sort of, you know, in history comes from there is there was a moment towards the end of the voyage - And I think it might have even been part post as well - where as a sign of respect to Fitzroy, Darwin gave Fitzroy the notes that he'd taken as a [ ] this and make sure that, you know, we're on the same page. And, and Fitzroy, you know, comes back with a glowing thumbs up and bang, the thing gets published, I'm sure edited, but yeah, it finds its way into the world, but just --
Amanda Niehaus 18:28
Because that's how that's how publishing happens all the time.
David Morton 18:31
Yeah I know, just staight out, right, it requires no work. Yeah, but it just felt like too good a narrative sort of turn to miss this idea that Darwin wanted his thoughts checked by someone else. And in our rendering of the characters in the play, by an individual who comes from an institution that has an unshakable foundation in a particular belief and, and what it might mean for someone coming from that context to to engage with this groundbreaking way of viewing the world. And I think that it, you know, in our adaptation fits to mirror the reality, but you know, Fitzroy's decision to back Darwin and to go, all right, like, let's go. I don't know, I think it might, I would hope it makes a nice comment on the ability of people who are otherwise fixed in a belief system, to if not change their own belief system, at least be able to respect the, you know, values and worldviews of others. Of course, in the real voyage of the Beagle, there was and that, that that document of the journal itself in his notes, that was before, you know, the, the really contentious material that he began to generate, in terms of Yeah, the way that species are able to change had arrived. So that's definitely a reimagining on our part, pulling some of that forwards.
Amanda Niehaus 19:49
Yeah. And I find that interesting in, in historical fiction and in in fiction that uses kind of scientific information as well like, there is this balance of, you know what? Like, what can we what can we reshape? And what do we need to maintain as kind of solid truth? And how do you how do you make that decision when you're working with a mythology or ...
David Morton 20:15
And it is particularly tough in this case, as well, because yeah, we're talking about real people. And I guess, and yet, it's so difficult because history, by its definition is not dramatic. But you know, the cause and effect does not work, like it needs to work in story time. Um, so the thing that I guess we tried to do is that all of the key characters, and the key sort of narrative gestures that sit within the work are all tied closely to this dramatic ideal of what it means to understand the way you view the world and whether or not you are open to change, or you're closed to change. And so there are definitely significant historical liberties that we've taken in terms of, of how that's navigated, I guess what we've tried to do in our creative process, working with our broader team, and also the cast, is to always just interrogate what the gestures behind those choices are. And, and, and to make sure, particularly as I say, given these are historical figures, we don't want to cast a value judgment on them. And I think that that's quite important, you know, that we go, that's, that's something for the audience to come to themselves, in terms of how they'd like to be viewed. I sort of yeah, I hope that answers your question.
Amanda Niehaus 20:18
Yeah.
David Morton 20:24
It's to do, for us, with impulse, you know. We've not, I don't think we've, we've tried very hard not to demonize anybody, you know, and it's an interesting play in that there is no antagonist, you know, the antagonist in this work is, is Darwin himself grappling with what he needs, what he needs to work through, and how he can overcome that struggle, which I think itself became useful, in itself became a useful device. Because, then we didn't have to, yeah, take some, you know, sea captain and turn them into a [ ] something to [ ] the drama,
Amanda Niehaus 21:56
Serial killer on the ship.
David Morton 21:57
[ ] But we also, we've been very clear, you know, with this show, and its various iterations that it is a reimagining, you know, it's a, it's a, we're trying to take the impulse, as I say, of how the thought how the thoughts developed for this individual, and yeah, and some of the experiences that might have led to that, and with a hope that an audience watching it might undergo a similar thing themselves, you know. [ ] might find themselves out in an ecosystem, or they see some particular creature that they've not seen before. That, you know, I think that's sort of our primary gesture behind all the decisions that we made in the work.
Amanda Niehaus 22:33
Yeah, and I think I think there's a lot of different ways that, that writers can use information in creative work. One of them is obviously to like instruct people, but like you said, kind of with with history it, it's not, it's not as fun or as interesting that way. It's, and you can sort of you can draw this, like, divide between yourself and your audience, can't you if you're, if you feel too pedantic, or?
David Morton 23:03
Yeah.
Amanda Niehaus 23:04
Yeah, you kind of need to immerse them. So it's, I think, I mean, one of the things for me, that came out of your show was, you know, this, this kind of imagining of a part of Darwin's life that I didn't, I didn't really know about, I mean, we all know about the voyage on the Beagle. But like you said, I didn't know how young he was or, and I hadn't really thought about kind of the, the societal and familial pressures that would have been on him at that stage that he would have had to go through. And so for me, it developed, I developed this, like curiosity that I didn't have before about what this was all about. So.
David Morton 23:39
Hey, that's awesome. That's so good to hear.
Amanda Niehaus 23:42
Yeah, it's great. I know. And we're, and I told you, my husband's a biologist. And, and I did training in biology too. And we don't, it's like you learn, you learn about, you know, the, you know, the theory of natural selection, but you never learn, you don't learn as much about the people beneath it. And I think that and that thought processes that that drive these sort of, like, you know, we imagine Darwin as the big old bearded guy who has it all figured out and like, it doesn't work that way. Right?
David Morton 24:14
Totally. Totally, totally. I know and, and also, you know, as an individual who came back from this voyage, and then for the remainder of his life undertook next to no travel. That it's like this, this Yeah, this one, four and a half to five year gap was profound, where it then drove him through a career.
Amanda Niehaus 24:36
Yeah, like, I wonder if he felt like he didn't need to travel anymore. Like he had it all or if it was just like, Whoa, that was that was pretty intense. I think I'm gonna stick to my little plot now.
David Morton 24:45
No, I - Yes. The feeling I get is Yeah, absolutely. That and I think too, you know, when I read his, his writings and and this is a personal bias of mine, but there's definitely I think as it's as you start to Push on, you know, through The Origin of Species, and then particularly in the Descent of Man, there's a shift. And, and, and maybe it's representative of how, you know, our thoughts develop as individuals ourselves as we age into a particular system or a way of being, but there's an openness to different, there's an openness to difference in The Voyage of the Beagle, as a text that I think begins to drop away, you know, as, as, as he starts to lock a worldview, and, and, and I think, honestly, you know, start to lock a worldview, which is far more emblematic of where we were, as a, as a Western or, you know, British society in that, you know, in that time, and I think, you know, when you look at some of his early thoughts around, and the movement that Emma Wedgwood, and her family was sort of, you know, leading on in the UK, around the abolishment of slavery throughout the empire. But then some of the things Darwin then goes on to say later in his writings are deeply problematic when you look at them through a modern lens. And I think that in itself is very interesting as a spectrum that, you know, here's this individual who went out and who saw and who had these obvious moments of epiphanies and thought, then came home and started to write material, which definitely changed the world. But such a reminder for us. And we've spoken about this a lot within our creative team that there is both very good and very bad, that came from those thoughts. I think we tried to allude to that in the play with the idea, you know, in the final lines of Emma saying that he's going to face a great struggle, and that there are consequences associated with everything we do. And particularly when we start talking about scientific thought, and, and what the ethical ramifications are going to be of anything that that breaks a paradigm.
Amanda Niehaus 26:46
Absolutely. Do you think we necessarily have to - in terms of sort of putting forward a big thought, Do you think it's, you know, we're kind of forced to streamline it and sort of put it into a rut so that we can kind of begin to convince others? Or? I mean, do you think that's just a natural progress of of a big idea? Or do you think that there's an openness that can be maintained?
David Morton 27:13
Gosh, I don't know, it's so interesting. And I think, I know, for me this work, and particularly, you know, as the world has changed around it, and as I say, it's not a new work for the company, like, it's gonna be - give it a couple of years and it'll be a decade old - and thank God socially, we've progressed an enormous amount, even in that time. And so I guess, when I look at this version of the production and what it means without, you know, current social conversation and debate, I think that it's like a, there's a, I think there's something that it says in terms of, you know, the fact that ultimately, we are all deeply, deeply conditioned by the societies that we're in and, and that having a chance to reflect back and go, there's the good, there's the bad, here's what came socially, here's what's the result of a bad choice, you know, like those, I think those things are good. And I know, I know, from my perspective, as one of the creatives behind the show, definitely go, you know, if we were to go this again, with a full revision, there's definitely politics in there that are, you know, due for a refresh. But I hope that what it does at its minimum, is it it gets an audience to go like, Oh, God, that feels icky. And then to dive in and go like, yes, it does. And it in fact, should, because it's not right, you know, and like, our current understandings have moved well beyond where that thought is, but um, yeah [ ]
Amanda Niehaus 28:30
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Um, I want to, I want to shift a little bit and talk about the puppets. Hey. So I so I previously studied animal behavior. And I have a lot of friends who study animal movement, and even animal biomechanics. And that was something that just stunned me in watching the production is how well you do the animal puppets. What kind of research did you do in creating the creatures that are in the show?
David Morton 29:05
That's awesome. So yeah, so we, we set ourselves a constraint, which was fun, but like we were saying before about this tour, that we're on a nice excuse to go and see some amazing places.But our rule was that any creature that we were going to include in the production we had to go and interact with. And so for the most part, we actually managed to do that in their endemic ecosystems, which was bonkers. Amazing.
Amanda Niehaus 29:33
You went to the Galapagos.
David Morton 29:34
Yeah. We spent we spent three months living in a permaculture village on Santa Cruz, which was just ridiculous. And yeah, the first morning I remember that, you know, one of the giant dome tortoises came lumbering past. Nick and I were standing in the kitchen and we had a similar reaction, you know when you're in the shower and suddenly a huntsman spider appears. There's something that is very large That is very not meant to be there and we sort of like [gasp] and then ventured out to, you know, see this unbelievable creature, from a respectful distance, of course, that it was. So so we Yeah, the process for the puppetry was that we sort of extensive, I guess like interactive research really or we were actually going and watching and then backing that up with with research online and looking at videos and trying to catch sort of key key behavioral tics or, or traits that that could feature into each of these. So we sort of built out these, I guess, you might call it like a behavioral palette, or like a factsheet. Like, here's the things and here are the things that are specifically unique about this creature that either we can find through performance, or we need to find in the engineering of the object. And then when it came time to actually build the puppets, we, we like took a stupid, big, nasty, horrible risk, which paid off brilliantly, which is that Nick and I were over - all of the puppets that we've made in the history of the company today - we built these ones in the in early 2016, so the company had been around for close to a decade by that point - they'd always been hand carved, you know, using band saws and jig saws to meticulously make each piece by hand and then assemble. And anyway, in the lead up to the premiere production, Nick and I were over in the States working on another show, until sort of right up until the point at which we needed to enter rehearsals back in Brisbane. And we'd heard a lot about this fabrication method called Laser cutting and how it was, you know, streamlining productivity. And so we decided that we would draw all of the creatures digitally as flat pack, you know, like Ikea nightmares. And we would then send those files ahead of our arrival back into Australia, we'd get to Australia six weeks before it opened, and surely everything would be fine. And so we set aside six months to draw, we didn't do a single prototype, I hand drew 17,500 tiny wooden pieces.
David Morton 32:00
It was just stupid and as we got on the plane, we sent them off to the laser cutter that we were working with in Brisbane. And I just remember sitting on that flight the whole time, going like, oh, please God let this work, because if it doesn't we're done, like it's over. And the first thing that we assembled when we got when we got over the jetlag was the rolling armadillo, which was like the, there's Yeah, 250 pieces in that little fella. And, yeah, we it worked. And I think of that 17,500 pieces, we ended up finding about 15 or 16 mistakes that had to be re-cut.
Amanda Niehaus 32:00
Oh my God.
Amanda Niehaus 32:38
That's amazing.
David Morton 32:39
But that, and that method is now absolutely the method the company uses for everything. But on that, I should say that when we're doing the designs for those, the great, amazing thing about nature is that it does mechanisms very, very well. We're all the beneficiary of them, and you know our, how we move. And so when we were designing the creatures, they all started with photographs sampled from the internet, but a lot taken from museums that we visited, who allowed us into their collections, of yeah - top view side view, front view of the skeletons of the animals we were looking at, and then we built mechanisms that mimicked the ball joints, hinge joints, various, I guess, components - that sounds soulless - to make up these creatures, and then we worked out how they could be simplified for use by the performers in a space. But yeah, for most of the creatures, all of the lengths between vertebrae and the numbers of ribs and you know, the relative size of this particular body part to another is all pulled directly from Yeah, biological studies. So we did derive them from Mother nature.
Amanda Niehaus 33:48
Yes, I love it. This needs to be a course somewhere like, like, instead of just like looking at anatomy in a textbook, it's like build an armadillo.
David Morton 33:59
I know, right? It's a nightmare. It needs a lot of red wine. But once you get through it, yeah.
Amanda Niehaus 34:04
Do you know what, I think most creative things require that.
David Morton 34:08
Exactly right.
Amanda Niehaus 34:10
So this, I can't remember another production that I've seen that used puppets the way that you do. What do you think puppets bring to theater?
David Morton 34:21
They they do two things, I think. One they let they let you do a lot more with a story. I think you know what, obviously and still in our work human actors are all, are the core, you know, the emotional core of what we do, but you know, it would be very different play if either we had none of those animals or you know, we had some poor performer dressed up as an armadillo, it would be a very different thing. So I think that it I think that it really expands the theatrical scope of what you can the sort of stories you can tell. And then similarly to that, the other thing that it does, which we just love, is that it means that From moment one, the audience are complicit in the fact that what they're watching is a fiction, and they are watching fiction being made. And I think that for particularly an adult audience, puppetry so often gets relegated to children. And I think that that's rubbish. I think, you know, ultimately, we all have those imaginative capacities. And it feels amazing when we exercise them. And so I think that it, it changes the way an adult audience experiences a theatre act, I think. And it also makes them more open to the way the rest of the staging works. Like in this show, we do the thing you're not meant to do, which is we move through time and space in a theater work, you know, that's film and animation, that's not theater, it should be fixed time fixed place, it's like, number one things you learn in drama school, which Kitchen Sink does this happen around, you know, maybe in Act 2 we'll move to the living room [ ]. But you know, we've got Yeah, 32 locations and it takes place over 5 1/2 years. And I think that there's a mental elasticity, that is us going to the audience, you know, these 320 pieces are a beagle - you're going to have to believe in that. And then they follow us. And we go right now we're going to start to paint some architecture using some planks and a model house. And then here's two enormous blocks, and you're going to have to follow them through earthquakes and up the Andes. And sometimes there'll be a ship, but then there'll be a whale boat. And, you know, it means that the entire theatrical event itself can go - follow us, because it's worth it.
Amanda Niehaus 36:25
Yeah. And I think there's, there's a joy to the puppets, like every time they would, a new one would come on stage, you could just hear the audience go ah!
David Morton 36:32
[ ] like, do little. Do you know, it's like, sometimes some of the early versions of the show, we were going back through them, as we were re-blocking some of the interactions with the creatures in this one, and just going, we're just doing too much. Like literally all it has to do is sit there and breathe a bit and everyone melts, because we know it's not real. And yet it's real. And we get that cognitive dissonance that just feels so amazing to sit in.
Amanda Niehaus 37:00
Yeah. And and I like that you've mentioned the, you know, sort of how you pushed up against the the idea that you have to kind of stick within one unit of time and space. And one of the things that I did really like was how you used the kind of artistic backdrop as a kind of transition. What was your thinking around kind of using - How did you how did you think about signifying time, I guess, in the different ways.I
David Morton 37:29
It felt it was sort of a couple of reasons why it felt like an important gesture. The first is exactly as you say, it was to do with how we could help for there to be more visual diversity in the way we painted location and, and to be able to feel like in addition to the lights and sound and the objects on stage, that we could help the audience to make jumps. But then the thing that it began to do, and over the versions of this production, I think it's, you know, done more and more and more is to give us an insight into not just the world, but the world according to Darwin - what he chooses to see within that and where there are moments of visual beauty, or where something is violent and horrifying, and, you know, pushed way further than in the reality but to give us a felt experience. And so to that end, the the illustration style that Justin, the vision designer who created all of that content lent into was, yeah, based on the archivist who was on the Beagle, and not that not that long ago, a lot of the original drawings were released of, you know - here's the crew standing around on the ship. And, you know, we tried to lean into that same his pencil and his watercolor, you know, and is it, is it captured in a mode that looks handmade, to hopefully link the audience that this is handmade and ultimately, it's thoughts.
Amanda Niehaus 38:49
Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Um, can you tell us a little bit about your current tour? around Australia? You've just left Brisbane,
David Morton 38:58
We've just left Brissie so currently we're up in Darwin. For the first, for the first stop. So we're a couple of days up here. And then we all head south to Alice Springs to play for a night which is just such a treat to get to take a big production, yeah, into the center of the country. Yeah, awesome. Then we cut back to the coast to Cairns then we head way down south to we're playing in Wollongong and in Canberra, back up north for a stop in the Redlands for us to - yep - to come back home for a little while and then the production heads to Tasmania and we're playing three venues around Tassie - Hobart, Launceston and then Devonport.
Amanda Niehaus 39:38
Oh, great. Yeah. Um, so you're coming back to the Brisbane area.
David Morton 39:41
We are Yeah, so Redlands we're.playing
Amanda Niehaus 39:43
That's great. Because like we because we saw your your play on the last weekend. We just we've been telling everyone and they're like - but it's gone!
David Morton 39:53
Oh, yeah no there's definitely still tickets available for the Redlands, which are Yeah, on our website, www.deadpuppetsociety.com.
Amanda Niehaus 39:59
That's great. And yeah, we'll add a we'll add a link to your website so that listeners can can find it as well. Um, you had if I'm correct, you had some international plans that were cancelled due to COVID. Is that right?
David Morton 40:15
Yeah, we did. Yeah. All sort of, hopefully at this point delayed. But, yeah, the production, we actually did a version of the production in the end of 2018, early 2019, which was in partnership with the Natural History Museum in London.
Amanda Niehaus 40:29
That would have been amazing.
David Morton 40:31
It was just ridiculous. Like they let us for almost six months transform an empty exhibition gallery in the old part of the museum into I think it was like a 350, 400 seat theater with all the bells and whistles. And yeah, we worked with some of the professors and the experts that are a part of the museum to create a very historically accurate, scientifically accurate version of the play. And yeah, played there and was an absolute treat. And the plan off the back of that was then for us to do a UK tour of the show. And there's heaps of interest, actually, to start in Shrewsbury, where Darwin was born on his birthday, which would have been [Amanda - Oh! ] just too lovely. Yeah, but that's, those plans were then put on hold with COVID. You know, naturally those Yeah, nothing touring around inside countries, let alone jumping across international borders. But yeah, we're currently working closely with our UK partners, Trish Wadley Productions and Glass Half Full Productions on get getting the interest back behind that. And hopefully, hopefully at sometime next year, we'll we'll do a run through the regional UK.
Amanda Niehaus 41:39
Yeah. Oh, that'll be fantastic. And in addition to The Wider Earth, like, do you are you also working on kind of the next thing?
David Morton 41:48
We are, Yeah, we have a number of a number of things in the [Amanda - a number of next things]. But yeah, not mainly things that are not quite yet to the point where I can talk about them. But we Yeah, there'll be some really fun stuff coming up in Brisbane later this year.
Amanda Niehaus 42:04
Okay, well, we will, we will keep our ears open for that.
David Morton 42:07
Awesome. Sorry. How annoying. Oh,
Amanda Niehaus 42:11
No, I know how it is. I have lots of writer friends who are like Big news coming but I Can't tell you anything about it yet.
David Morton 42:17
I know. Those people. Like far out, excuse me.
Amanda Niehaus 42:24
Well, thank you so much, David, for your time today. It's been an absolute pleasure chatting with you.
David Morton 42:30
Likewise, thank you, thank you for your amazing questions.
Amanda Niehaus 42:35
And just to remind everyone who's listening, we're going to include some links to Dead Puppet Society, and to the upcoming shows, so that you can hopefully book in and get out there and see this production.
David Morton 42:47
That'd be amazing. And if anyone is, too, interested in, you know, the way that we work as a company, and particularly our approach to representing natural forms and creatures in you know, in performing objects - we have, we have we're lucky enough now to have a home base in Wooloongabba, next to the Princess Theatre. So we're on the corner of Annerly Road and Stanley Street. And for most of the year, so when we're, the company is not all on the road. We have a gallery and workshop space there that's open to the public with uniform pieces. And yeah, so if anyone would like to drop by and visit. Yeah, we'll keep keep the details as to when that's open updated on our website. Among that we'll be back if anyone's to come and say hi.
Amanda Niehaus 43:25
Yeah. Oh, that's fantastic. And that is an area full of great cafes and restaurants to like, make a day of it.
David Morton 43:32
And catch a gig at the Princess afterwards.
Amanda Niehaus 43:34
That is, that was a phenomenal. I've never been there. I think it's been redone recently. Yeah. It's phenomenal.
David Morton 43:40
Less than a year and they've done an amazing job. But what a treat right in Yeah, to get a brand new historical theater in Brisbane.
Amanda Niehaus 43:49
I love it. Thanks, David.
David Morton 43:51
Thank you so much.
[Post chat]