From Eureka, our new science and
environment magazine

The battle of ideas, the carnage of the courtroom, the conflict between love and duty — Inherit the Wind is a play that inhabits many war zones. A loose dramatisation of the 1925 trial of John Scopes for teaching evolution in a Tennessee classroom in defiance of state law, it is a staple of the American stage and has been filmed three times. Now the Old Vic — doing its bit for the Darwin bicentenary — is staging it, directed by Trevor Nunn.

While the original case was known as the Scopes Monkey Trial, in fact Scopes, a 24-year-old substitute science teacher, was overshadowed by the three big guns of the case. These were William Jennings Bryan, a populist lawyer and politician who rolled into Dayton, Tennessee, to prosecute Scopes; Clarence Darrow, a famous trial attorney and civil libertarian, for the defence; and H.L. Mencken, the Baltimore journalist who reported the fun.

In the play, Scopes becomes the character Bertram Cates; Bryan becomes Matthew Brady; Darrow becomes Henry Drummond. And while the town of Dayton becomes fictional Hillsboro, its citizens appear to be troglodytes. Like members of the Taleban in straw boaters and summer frocks, they bawl “give me some of that old-time religion” and bay with their local mullah for blood.

Times Archive, 1925: Darwinism in schools

The trial to test the validity of the anti-evolution law in the state of Tennessee began today with prayer

• Archive Topic: The Scopes 'monkey' trial

Cates is, as Scopes was, a bit of a cipher and has only one good line: “Man was not stuck here like a geranium in a flowerpot.” But a brown-haired girl loves him and visits him in jail. At this point the newspaper man asks: “Can it be that beauty and biology are on our side?” Well, not really as it turns out: she’s the preacher’s daughter and a broken reed for a reluctant rationalist martyr to lean on.

Drummond is played by Kevin Spacey, who at first is got up to look like Sir David Attenborough. Then when we arrive in court the scene would not look out of place in the late Cretaceous period. Here Drummond rears up on his hind legs, bares his fangs and resembles a tyrannosaur. Meanwhile the prosecutor Brady, triceratops-like, proves a worthy opponent. He gores the defence, denying him witness after witness. The giants lumber about and the Old Vic resounds to the roar of their rhetoric.

Then comes the fatal mistake — Brady allows himself to be cross-examined on the literal truth of the scripture, and it is as if he has exposed his soft underbelly. Drummond takes him apart and though Brady does in fact win, his wounds are too great and soon the prosecutor is literally dead. While the victorious Drummond mourns his vanquished foe, “Hypocrite” is the response of a rat-like mammal scuttering through the undergrowth: it’s the newspaper man, wise-cracking personification of an unprincipled, unforgiving, media.

Spacey and David Troughton, who plays Brady, are charismatic and complex as the dinosaur lawyer adversaries. Mark Dexter is a slickly effective reporter rat. While Sonya Cassidy begins uncertainly as the brown-haired girl, at the end of the play she delivers a soliloquy to melt hearts. You can see a glossy version of much the same scene in Creation, Jon Amiel’s new film about the writing of On the Origin of Species. But there the brown-haired girl is Darwin's wife Emma, played by Jennifer Connelly. Both women have read On the Origin; they don’t really get it — they’re not that bright. But they conclude that their chaps are worth sticking with, although certainly damned in the afterlife.

Inherit the Wind is often seen as a dramatisation of the battle between evolutionary theory and biblical creationism, or else as the fight for intellectual liberty against a proscriptive state. Is it? These days, by peculiar irony, it is creationists who are constantly in the dock pleading the right to teach intelligent design against the stifling effects of the US constitution. They are a warning that liberty cuts both ways and that it’s truth that really matters. But whose truth?

In the final scene, Drummond holds a Bible in one hand and On the Origin in the other and weighs them up. He knows that the trial was less a stand for liberty than a skirmish in the clash of civilisations. It was about how, in a backwater of the southern United States, the rump of Christian belief, enfeebled, grotesque but defiant, stood briefly to bay against the Enlightenment. In London, the victory of the rational, secular, pluralistic society is so complete that Inherit the Wind can be viewed only as a period piece. But it may resonate in Istanbul or Tehran.

Armand Marie Leroi is Professor of Evolutionary Developmental Biology at Imperial College London. Inherit the Wind is at the Old Vic, London, until December 20

Click here to read more from Eureka

Times Recommends

• In Margot Fonteyn's footsteps
• Forget beautiful people, let's have wonky Brits
• Fundamentalist brew: faith and power