Longitude – Upstairs at the Gatehouse
There seems to be no story which cannot be made into a musical nowadays. The fascinating history of the struggle to devise a marine navigational aid to accurately measure longitude is the latest, in a new musical written and produced by Kaz Maloney.
The story focuses on John Harrison, the northern carpenter and clockmaker, who responded to the Board of Longitude's appeal in the early 1700s for solutions to this navigational dilemma, which was causing the loss of thousands of lives at sea. For the most part, the narrative of the story accurately follows John Harrison's story and his interactions with the Board, who were made up of well renowned establishment figures of the day. The style of the production was an interesting contrast between the more or less realistic ...