BWW Reviews: THE EIGHTH WONDER OF THE WORLD, The Brunel Museum Thames Tunnel, June 8 2015

Two of the most alpha of alpha males - Marc Brunel and his son Isambard Kingdom Brunel - are broke, but their dream of constructing the world's first tunnel under a navigable river burns as brightly as ever. They're hosting a dinner for potential funders (and, at the younger man's insistence, another for the men digging this miracle out of the soil and sludge) and they're not seeing eye to eye. They bicker, they bully, they brawl, but, beneath the surface, each man respects the other's abilities and ambition - and, nearly 200 years on with the tunnel still used by London commuters, so do we.

Peter Harding's Marc is a big bruiser of a man, coarse and cantankerous, a man who has done time in a debtors' prison and retains the appetities of youth even as his body is collapsing. Ben Eagle's Isambard is the intellectual, a man with the sensibilites of the coming Victorian Age, but not above being provoked one time too many. The actors literally circle each other as they dream of tunnels and bridges and the world that they did so much to bring forth.

The star of this show, however, is neither man - but, fittingly, their work - the vast cylindrical shaft they sank into Rotherhithe to transport men and materials to the tunnel itself. Entered by crawling through a 3ft or so square entrance, then down a scaffold staircase (easier than it sounds - though it could hardly be otherwise) the show takes place in this most Brunellian of surroundings. Especially if you spend twenty minutes or so above ground in the Museum (entry included in the ticket price), it's impossible not to feel the presence of the men who lived, and died, so that we might shape the great metropolis to our needs. Like the men who made London's almost incredible sewer system (men who may have saved more lives than even the greatest medical scientists), we should be grateful for their unfettered ambition, hard work and courage for our debt to them continues and always will.

The Eight Wonder of the World continues at the Brunel Museum until 14 June.

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