Belle Moral is a play by Ann-Marie MacDonald

Ann-Marie MacDonald

Ann-Marie MacDonald is a Canadian playwright, novelist, actor and broadcast journalist who lives in Toronto, Ontario. The daughter of a member of Canada's military, she was born at an air force base near Baden-Baden, West Germany....

 which premiered at the Shaw Festival

Shaw Festival

The Shaw Festival is a major Canadian theatre festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, the second largest repertory theatre company in North America...

 in 2005.

A substantial reworking of MacDonald's earlier play, The Arab's Mouth

The Arab's Mouth

The Arab's Mouth is a 1990 play by Ann-Marie MacDonald which she later revised to create Belle Moral, at which point most of the Arabic references were cut. The title refers to a shape found on a stone by the central character—a circle or zero...

, Belle Moral is a gothic comedy set in Scotland in 1899. Following her father's death, Pearl MacIsaac, a young woman who is an amateur scientist, struggles to discover the secret about her family's past which her father had kept hidden with the help of the family doctor. The play embraces a complex range of turn-of-the-century thought, especially including Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin

Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...

's theory of evolution, contemporary medical beliefs and the concept of eugenics

Eugenics

Eugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually referring to human populations. The origins of the concept of eugenics began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance,...

.