Like confessing a murder

This specially commissioned BBC Radio drama, by Craig Baxter, is based entirely on Charles and Emma Darwin’s own words and correspondence.

Alex Jennings plays Charles and Oona Beeson plays Emma Darwin.
The play was directed by Penny Boreham and is a Ruth Evans production.

Behind the controversial public persona, Darwin was an affectionate family man,
fully engaged – sometimes heartbreakingly so – in the lives of his wife, Emma
and their children. Emma was not without her own concerns about the spiritual
implications of some of her husband’s ideas, fearing they would undermine his
Christian faith. How could he reconcile these apparent contradictions – which,
years before the publication of Origin, when outlining the theory to Joseph Dalton
Hooker, Darwin had said felt ‘like confessing a murder’. The letters recreate the
domestic context from which evolution by natural selection arose.