Themes: Time, Empire and Adventure
Three Interlocking Themes
Around the World in 80 Days asks three related questions that operate simultaneously: what does time mean? What does the British Empire mean? And what is adventure? These are not separate compartments in the play — they are woven together in every scene. Fogg’s obsession with the schedule is inseparable from the Victorian culture of industrial precision that made British imperialism possible. The places Fogg travels through — India, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, America — are the map of British and European colonial reach in 1872. And the sense of adventure that Verne’s novel celebrates is, in a modern production, always in dialogue with the question of whose world is being adventured through. A post-colonial reading of the play does not require abandoning the adventure — it requires understanding what the adventure was for.
Time, Schedule and Victorian Punctuality
The wager itself — £20,000 on an eighty-day circumnavigation — is a meditation on industrial time. The Suez Canal and the transcontinental railroad had made the journey mathematically possible; Fogg tests this possibility against the precision of timetables, departure slots and scheduled connections. For a Victorian audience, this celebration of schedule was a celebration of modernity itself: steam, rail, and the telegraph had compressed the world into measurable units. From a staging perspective, the theme of time can be physicalised in many ways. A sound designer might create a soundscape in which a ticking clock is woven underneath every scene — barely audible at the start but gradually louder as the eighty days compress. The rhythm of the ensemble’s physical work — the mechanical precision of the steam engine sequence, the synchronised tick of the Reform Club gentlemen consulting their watches — gives the theme physical form.
The theme of time is not just a narrative fact — it is a design opportunity. A ticking clock soundscape, growing in volume as the eighty days diminish, physicalises the countdown and creates cumulative tension for the audience regardless of which scene they are watching.
The British Empire and the Colonial Gaze
Verne’s novel is a product of the imperial imagination: the world outside Europe exists primarily as backdrop for Fogg’s determination and Passepartout’s comedy. The Indian characters are largely incidental; Aouda is defined initially by her need to be rescued; the Native American attack on the transcontinental railroad is a thrilling obstacle rather than a historically contextualised act of resistance. A 21st-century production cannot present this material uncritically without becoming uncomfortable in ways that serve neither the play nor the students watching it. Eason’s script and the production tradition around it find a range of ways to address this: the ensemble’s awareness of each new location can be performed with genuine curiosity rather than condescension; Aouda’s arc gives an Indian woman agency in the second half of the play; and design choices about costume and soundscape can represent the cultures Fogg passes through with specificity and respect rather than as a generic “exotic.”
A strong answer acknowledges this tension and engages with it as a production question rather than a moral verdict. The question is not “is this play racist?” but “how would you, as a director or designer, stage the Indian marketplace scene so that the audience engages with India as a real, complex place rather than a colourful backdrop for Fogg’s journey?” This is a staging and design question, and it has specific, assessable answers.
Consider three specific design approaches a modern director might take. First, in soundscape: a sound designer could build the Indian marketplace scene from authentic Indian musical textures — a tabla rhythm, a specific raga mode played on sitar — rather than a generic “Eastern” musical cliché. This communicates that the production has engaged with the real culture rather than Verne’s impression of it. Second, in costume: ensemble members playing Indian characters might have specific, researched costume elements — a particular fabric, a specific garment form — that communicate cultural identity with precision. Third, in performance: the ensemble members might play Indian characters with the same specificity and gestus care they bring to the Reform Club gentlemen, resisting the temptation to use Indian scenes as pure physical spectacle. None of these choices requires rewriting the play; all of them require careful, thoughtful production design.
Adventure, Comedy and the Audience
The third major theme — adventure — is the play’s most immediate emotional register. Audiences come to have fun, to follow a chase, to laugh at Passepartout and admire Fogg. The adventure genre has specific theatrical vocabulary: pace, physical spectacle, comic reversal, the near-miss. Eason honours this by keeping every episode moving, by using the tableau sparingly for high-impact moments (the rescue of Aouda, the final reveal), and by placing the ensemble’s physical virtuosity at the centre of each new location. A director working on this play must balance the adventure’s energy with the moments of stillness that give the themes weight. The London ending — in which Fogg believes he has failed, then discovers through the international date line that he has succeeded — requires a complete tonal shift: from the silence of apparent defeat to the joy of unexpected victory. Blackout followed by an entirely different lighting state can serve this tonal pivot: a deep silence and near-darkness for the apparent failure, then a warmth of light and sound flooding back in as the date line is revealed.
The London ending demands a tonal pivot: Fogg’s apparent failure followed by the date line revelation. A blackout and silence mark the low point; a warm lighting wash and sound flooding back in mark the turn — a simple but powerful staging choice that communicates the emotional reversal.
Students sometimes feel that the “correct” answer to colonial themes is to stage the play as a critique of Fogg or Verne. This is too simple. The play’s joy and energy come from the adventure; a production that turns the comedy into a lecture about imperialism will lose its audience. The more sophisticated production approach — and the stronger one — is to use design and performance choices to add depth and specificity to the non-European characters and locations, so that the world Fogg travels through feels genuinely inhabited by real people with their own dignity, rather than as a backdrop. This does not require condemning Fogg; it requires the production to be aware of what Verne’s novel couldn’t see, and to quietly, visually correct that blind spot through skilled design.