The 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species has sparked renewed debate on every angle of the naturalist’s works. Murray Watts’s new play Mr Darwin’s Tree, which premiered at Westminster Abbey earlier this month, tackles the much-debated subject of the relationship between science and religion.

Starring Andrew Harrison, this two-hour production draws on Darwin’s diaries and correspondence to explore the “shifting of certainties” on science and religion during his life. The makeshift stage in the abbey was positioned just feet away from where Darwin was buried. It was sparse, but for a solitary tree with a ladder in the middle of it. This used to symbolise Darwin’s first sketch of the tree of life. The tree of life was the metaphor he used for phylogeny, which refers to the study of evolutionary connections between organisms.

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