https://viewfromthegods.co.uk/2025/05/24/saskia-wesnigk-wood-darwins-cleaner-unitarian-brighton/

Dr Simon Jenner wrote in View from the Gods and Fringe Review: “This could be a compelling tool for inquiring not only the origin of species, but the origins of feminism and education. All Victorian topics that Darwin’s contemporaries from Ada Lovelace, Mary Somerville and John Stuart Mill were tackling. Wesnigk-Wood has taken a far more imaginative direction: and thrust a gifted woman into the chains of unlearning and class oppression; and measured a life’s frustration in an hour. Compelling, a show that may touch Fringe greatness.”

Olivia Post as
Darwin’s Cleaner
written and directed by Saskia Wesnigk-Wood

3 performances at Brighton’s Unitarian Church May 2025

Imagine what a woman’s life was like if she was born in 1809 as a servant’s daughter. They call her Hen and decide, as she is ‘merely a girl’, she will at least be useful. But then… there is another child born that day, in the same house, and he is the master’s son: the extraordinary Charles Darwin!

Audience Review: “Hen’ is thoughtfully, profoundly and expertly portrayed by Olivia Post as a ‘constructed’ woman of her time, facing significant joys and sorrows as a result of her birth into the working classes, her gender, her sadness at child loss, widowhood and her subsequent vulnerability and dependence on others for work, security and housing.”

Behind a great man, as the saying goes, stands a great woman – why not a great servant? Hen was there from the start, Charles’s playmate and friend, observing his shenanigans as a wayward youngster, eventually becoming his maid, assistant and family factotum.

We meet Hen when she has had enough of the mess and the carcasses, the flesh eating plants and the pinned butterflies. A woman can only put up with so much, and life has thrown a lot at our resilient and loving Henrietta Brown. Watch Hen dishing the dirt on the Darwins and finding her own way as the world for Victorian women begins to change.

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2025 – Brighton Fringe – Unitarian Church

https://www.brightonfringe.org/events/the-angel-of-death-will-see-you-now/

After a bungled mugging leaves him teetering on the brink of the great beyond, a hapless teacher finds himself face-to-face with the Angel of Death – a quizmaster with a twisted sense of humour, and our teacher’s fate is the grand prize. The catch? The audience is part of the game. Can you help him outwit the Angel and escape the mysterious allure of Death’s door?

Brighton’s very own rock opera trailblazers, Trim Tab Productions, return to the Fringe with their third and most audacious show yet. Combining electrifying live music, razor-sharp dark comedy and an unmissable dose of interactive silliness, this is a theatrical experience like no other. Get ready to laugh, quiz, and rock out as though your life depends on it – because it very well might…

Written by James Mannion, music by James and the Band, directed by Saskia Wesnigk-Wood