Forthcoming Show for October 2007

Information

To book this show

Tel  01433 621 624xor email

The Theme

‘Sublime and overwhelming beauty and grandeur but yet treacherous sea ice, collapsing cliffs as high as cathedrals, ghostly whale shoals beneath their keels – the eerie ringing whale music. What dreams and experiences must have been unarticulated by the men who visited these coasts, that could not have been put in official reports?

In 1823 the North American arctic was still as distant as fable, the last complete undiscovered ecosystem on the planet.  A landscape of numinous events, of a forgiving benediction of light and of darkness so dunning it precipitated madness, of a cold that froze vinegar and fractured whatever it penetrated, including the stones.  Europeans had perished there since the time of the Norse – gangrenous with frostbite, poisoned by polar bear liver, rotted by scurvy, dead of exposure on the ice next to the wreck of a ship, burned to the waterline for its last bit of warmth.’

Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez

The Story

The year is 1844. A man answers a newspaper advertisement inviting him to apply to join a ship bound for arctic waters, to explore the unknown wastes north of Greenland.  What sort of man might he be? What draws him on to undertake this journey? Is there something in his past life that pushes him to leave home and travel to this unknown, inhospitable place? His experiences on the voyage – the loneliness, the strength sapping treks across the ice, the merciless cold – change him forever. As his story unfolds the certainties of his early life are stripped away.  In extremis we see what really drives him as he comes face to face with death.  

What had he hoped to find?  What sort of place did he think lay out there?  Was he drawn relentlessly onwards by the fixation of his imagination, as were Davis and Baffin before him?  Did he crave scientific fame or hunger after the unusual? Or was it simply that he desired something, the fulfilment of some deep unarticulated personal dream to which he had pinned his life.

This is a story of adventure on the arctic ice, the search for the North Pole and the Northwest Passage, of man’s heroic struggle against alien conditions.

The play weaves together many stories:

q       Sir John Franklin was a naval officer at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.  In later years he journeyed extensively in the Canadian arctic.  In 1845 he commanded a sea expedition to find the Northwest Passage.  Leaving Baffin Bay via Lancaster Sound he wintered at Beechey Island but was beleaguered by thick ice in Victoria Strait in 1846.  Franklin died the following year. 105 members of the crew died of scurvy and starvation on the long walk to safety. It is said that Franklin ate his boots before he died.

q       Edward Israel sailed north out of St John’s Newfoundland in 1881.  He established base camp on Ellesmere Island and explored the surrounding territory the following year.  But the expedition foundered and he desperately retreated south.  Sixteen perished.  Israel died just before relief arrived. 

q       In Lancaster Sound in 1857, a whaling ship, the Cambrian, came upon a 57-foot whale asleep.  She awoke as they approached, swam round the ship, and then pushed it backwards for two minutes before being harpooned.  Incidents like this made arctic whale men uneasy. Was this an eerie warning of doom? Was she urging them to go back before the ice laid claim to them?

The Show

This show is currently in development.  It will be available in October 2007. It will be a piece for one actor lasting about an hour and a half, plus an interval.  It will be portable and flexible, fitting into a variety of small venues and requiring only short get-in times.  We tour our own lights when we visit community venues.

It will be suitable for adults and children over 12 years old.

The cost of the show is £550.

The Writer

Caroline Small is a playwright, director, performer and storyteller. She writes scripts for children’s theatre and youth theatre, for adult audiences and for audio drama. Her plays for Cotton Grass Theatre include Into the Rose Garden, The Hollow Country, Black Bread and Tired Feet and Gardens of Delight. Recent projects include Cabbage and Custard, an audio drama for children, and Travels with a Broken Heart, a collaboration with singer Carol Bowns and pianist Heidi Rolfe. She is currently working on a new play commissioned for the 75^th anniversary of the mass trespass on Kinder Scout in 1932 for production in July 2007. Caroline is also an experienced workshop leader, specialising in participatory theatre making and creative writing with people of all ages in education and community settings.