Gilbert is Dead

London's most celebrated taxidermist, Lucius Trickett, closets himself away with his wheelchair-bound daughter after the death of his wife - until he is roused from his retirement by the challenge of disproving Charles Darwin's recently published 'book of Beelzebub' with the help of Queen Victoria and an explorer by the name of Gilbert Shirley.

Robin French (co-author of ITV's 'Trinity') has written a 'scientific mystery play' that sounds like it should be fun in a hokey, let's-send-the-Victorians-up kind of way. It's also genuinely ambitious in trying to deal with a smorgasbord of big, very human themes, grief and faith being among the principals. Unfortunately the author fails to create a mechanism that can deliver such big ideas and emotions dramatically and Robert Wolstenholme's staging is an awkward hotchpotch of styles, alternating between parody and a kind of dark gothic tragedy. There are laughs and a bit of grandstanding pathos, but for the most part the action progresses at about the same rate as evolution, with some of the scenes proving so static that it's hard to tell the actors from the taxidermy.