Review: Around the World in 80 Days
Theatre company Ha Hum Ah returned to Scilly this month with three performances of Around the World in 80 Days - a madcap, high-speed adventure around the world with Phileas Fogg.
Jonathan Ball - co-founder of Eden Project - attended one of their summer shows on Scilly and has sent us a review of the show.
We’re delighted to share his review with our audience - it’s part of The Great Atlantic Way’s Spirit of Place series, which will be published soon.
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The Great Atlantic Way’s Spirit of Place Series: The Isles of Scilly
A Midsummers’ Night To Dream
21 June 2025
In the year 1836, two doors opened to the world.
One, on a bluff above the western sea, where Augustus Smith laid the foundation stone for St Mary the Virgin Parish Church on the Isles of Scilly , it’s incumbent a Chaplain , for the islands were deemed ‘overseas’ by the Church of England…….a world apart.
The other, in the smoky heart of London, the year the Reform Club first flung open its Pall Mall doors to the likes of Phileas Fogg , gentlemen of progress and empire. Who could have known then that these twin thresholds—one weathered by Atlantic storm , the other scented by leather and port—would, nearly two centuries later, be joined in whimsical triumph by a travelling theatre and a ticking clock?
For last night, in the Chaplaincy Garden, Ha Hum Ah summoned the spirit of Jules Verne, and set off Around the World in 80 Days without ever leaving the lawn.
Magical moments provide feasts for memories. And here…amid a whirlwind of waistcoats and suitcases, bowlers and braces, the church clock struck whimsy.
Church & Chaplaincy , both gifts to the Isles imposed with architectural flair and theological stubbornness, looked on with stoic charm. Stones, once set to serve the spiritual fringes of empire, now backdropped a stage for a younger empire of imagination: Ha Hum Ah, a Cornish troupe of miraculous pace, whose talent travels faster than Fogg’s balloon.
Here, on Midsummer’s Night , with the constancy of seagulls and gentle salt breeze, three actors burst into dozens of guises. There were split-second transformations, accents tumbling like dice across a map still coloured pink, and swift costume changes so they might have been smuggled in a magician’s hat.
They brought forth not merely the clatter of trains, the slap of paddle-steamers, the plod of elephant howdah’s…but the giggles and gasps of grownups, and that rarest applause - the shared joy of a community catching its breath in laughter.
To be there and to see Scilly in such a moment is to touch genius loci—not just the wild grandeur of Mother Nature, of wrecks and saints, but the gentler magic of theatre in a place that allows time to soften.
Here, with the evening’s glow illuminating the nearby stained glass windows with their stories of lifeboatmen and heroic Schiller feats , another tale was spun—sillier, swifter, incandescent with human wit—and suddenly, the Chaplaincy Garden was a stage where the past and the present clapped hands.
Let it be recorded, then, that on a gentle island midsummers evening, the clock was ticking…but no one was minded to race it. The world was round, the laughter was local, and Ha Hum Ah brought the globe to Scilly in a little over eighty glorious minutes.
By Jonathan Ball MBE AADip RIBA FRSA Hon FRIAS
Co-Founder, Eden Project
Founder, The Great Atlantic Way
