“This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Performance Research on 2 May 2014, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13528 165.2013 .908051

Icescape Theatre: Staging the Antarctic

Elizabeth Leane, University of Tasmania

This is earthscape transfigured into icescape. Here

is a world informed by ice: ice that welds together

a continent: ice on such a scale that it shapes and

defines itself: ice that is both substance and

style: ice that is both landscape and allegory.

Stephen Pyne (1988: 3)

For environmental historian Stephen Pyne, author of The

Ice: A journey to Antarctica, a seminal interdisciplinary

history of Antarctica, ice in its various manifestations

and meanings is the key to understanding Earth’s

southernmost continent. Pyne argues that the sheer scale

of the ice cap (that is more than four kilometres deep at

some points), and its reductive minimalism, foreclosed

creative responses to Antarctica. Humanity’s inability to

come to terms aesthetically with the southern icescape

means that the region ‘has been largely a wasteland for

imaginative literature’ (1988: 154). Traditional

representative approaches, he argues, could never hope to

express the icescape’s abstract, minimal environment, but

modernism, which was by contrast ‘ideally suited’ to the

icescape, instead drew its material from the cultures

that had produced it (188).

Pyne’s argument, however, is focused on art and

literary fiction; in the theatre, things were somewhat

different. Certainly, naturalism and realism eschewed the

Antarctic. Although icescape scenes are not completely

unknown in realist theatre (a Norwegian glacier features,

for example, in Henrik Ibsen’s play Brand, first

performed in full in 1885), evoking the vast, largely

unexplored Antarctic region through representational

scenery would run the risk of falling embarrassingly

short. However, modernism and postmodernism, free from

mimetic requirements, embraced the possibilities of the

far southern ice.

With the ‘spatial turn’ in recent criticism, the

relationships between theatre, place and landscape have

generated considerable interest, but the peculiar

challenges and opportunities that the Antarctic icescape

offers, both on page and stage, have yet to receive

attention. This article examines these challenges and

some of the multiple responses that they have generated

over the last two centuries.

My title to this article, ‘Icescape Theatre’,

deliberately echoes that of Elinor Fuchs and Una

Chaudhuri’s collection Land/Scape/Theater. ‘Landscape’,

Chaudhuri and Fuchs note, is a ‘slippery’ and ‘shape-

shifting’ term, with a complex relationship to the

equally contested terms ‘place’ and ‘space’: ‘Landscape

is more grounded and available to visual experience than

space, but more environmental and constitutive of the

imaginative order than place’ (Chaudhuri and Fuchs 2002:

3). It is tempting to conceive of the Antarctic as pure

space: Its stereotypical representation as a white,

unbroken emptiness seems to require the abstract, non-

humanized qualities suggested by that term. Such a

homogenizing approach, however, is misleading. The

Antarctic region—and even the continent itself—is large

and varied. The coastal areas, with their plentiful

animal life, calving icebergs and oceans that are

constantly melting and freezing, contrast markedly with

the high interior plateau, which is itself not completely

blank but punctuated by both natural and human-made

features. The Antarctic is, moreover, quite distinct from

the Arctic ice with which it is too often conflated in

cultural analyses.

Antarctica’s heterogeneity also renders ‘place’ a

problematic term to apply to it as a whole: In what way

does it help to refer to an entire continent, and one

that is significantly larger than Europe, Australia or

the United States and one that is claimed by seven

different nations but is owned by none, as a unitary

‘place’? If place is simply space in which humans have

invested meaning and attachment (Cresswell 2004: 10),

then Antarctica as a whole may indeed lay claim to the

term—on this basis, in fact, it was a place long before

the continent was ever seen by humans, because from at

least the ancient Greeks onwards we have invested the

speculative great southern land with meaning. But if

‘place’ requires in addition some physical intervention,

so that it becomes a ‘material setting for social

relations’ (7), then the situation is less clear. While

certain Antarctic sites are settled, complete with

infrastructure, artefacts and associated memories, it is

difficult to understand some areas of the interior

plateau, unmarked by any human presence or obvious

topographical variation, as distinct ‘places’. Certain

sites (such as historic huts) have significant national

and political meaning, but the continent also includes

the largest unclaimed territory in the world. (According

to the Antarctic Treaty (1959), while national claims

still exist, these claims can be neither strengthened nor

weakened, and no new claims can be made, as long as the

Treaty endures.)

‘Landscape’, which Chaudhuri and Fuchs argue is

‘inside space’ but ‘contains place’ (2002: 3), and which

evokes a ‘material topography’ (Cresswell 2004: 11),

would seem a more helpful term than both ‘space’ and

‘place’, if it were not for the fact that land is not

much in evidence in Antarctica. Edward Casey refers to

land- and seascapes as the two basic ‘modes of scapement’

(2011: 107). In the case of Antarctica, however, it seems

important to reach for another term: one that shares

elements of both of these scapes—solidity and fluidity—

but is not fully described by either. Exposed land

comprises only about 2 per cent of Antarctica, mostly

around the coast. Thus, if anything links the disparate

places and spaces of the continent, it is the ice—and it

is important to acknowledge that the ice is three-

dimensional. The continent is not a static blank canvas

on which humanity can inscribe its footprints. It is

rather an unstable icescape, riven with fissures,

constantly on the move, doubling its size in winter,

melting and breaking away at its edges. It is, like the

term ‘landscape’, unavoidably slippery and shape-

shifting. Playwrights, directors and scenographers who

have accepted the challenge of representing the icescape

have responded to it in diverse ways, from the use of a

bare or nearly bare stage, through suggestive effects

produced by white cloth, light, visual projection and

even hydraulically mounted Plexiglas, to ice itself.

However, one of the hardest aspects of the Antarctic

icescape to capture remains this dynamic, shape-shifting,

unstable quality.

With a brief human history, no permanent settlement

and a transient population of people constrained by age,

health and occupation, the continent offers a restricted

range of possible topics to the creative writer: ‘The

Antarctic experience,’ Pyne notes, ‘was powerful but

invariant, intense but limited’ (1988: 155). For those

writing for the theatre, the same limitations apply to

the available kinds of places in which an Antarctic play

could be set. As geographer Yi-Fu Tuan has observed,

icescapes produce a stark spatial binary: the ‘homeplace’

of the hut or station, and the ‘alien space’ of the

hostile frozen environment (1993: 154). The mediating

‘home space’ (to use Tuan’s phrase) that lies between the

two in more moderate climates is reduced to nothing (140,

154). No familiar or cultivated area—no garden, no park,

no suburb, no town—lies between the interior safety of

the dwelling and the exterior threat of the elements.

In an extreme icescape such as Antarctica, this

means that human experience—particularly in the early

days of exploration—has tended to oscillate between

agoraphobia and claustrophobia: the oppressive white

vastness of the plateau, or the oppressive, crowded

interior of the hut or the tent. For playwrights, the

same binary presents itself: Antarctic theatre can centre

on ‘home’, which, a century ago could have been a hut, a

tent, or even an upturned boat. This lends itself to the

interiority of traditional theatrical space and to

intense exploration of character but threatens a tedious,

directionless plot. This was a complaint of British

critics reviewing David Young’s play Antarctica in 2001.

The play follows the story of a group of men who spent

seven months—including long periods of darkness—in an

ice-cave. ‘A polar dug-out in 1912 might seem like a

dream situation for a playwright’, wrote a reviewer in

The Independent newspaper, ‘but Antarctica demonstrates

that the terrain is also full of dramaturgical traps’

(Taylor 2001: 12). More often, plays focus on journeys to

and across the icescape, in which plot comes ready-made

in both comic and tragic forms but staging poses

significant challenges.

There seems to have been a strange historical

complicity between the development of Antarctic

exploration and developments in theatre. When exotic

spectacle dominated the stage, humans (initially sealers

and whalers, as well as exploratory expeditions) were

marvelling at the sublime ice-cliffs and bergs of the

continent’s coast. As modernism was turning towards

mindscapes and minimalism, explorers marched along the

continent’s lifeless, comparatively featureless, interior

desert. At the same time that, according to Chaudhuri and

Fuchs, ‘theatre began to manifest a new spatial

dimension … in which landscape for the first time held

itself apart from character and became a figure of its

own’ (2002: 3), human engagement with the Antarctic

continent began in earnest—although it took some time for

the ice to emerge as a figure in, rather than a backdrop

for, human drama. [{Note }]1 What kind of theatre will

best suit Antarctica’s most recent role—as a wilderness

that is both threatened and threatening as its icescapes

respond to warming conditions—remains to be seen. It is

the history of this relationship between the far southern

ice and the stage that I want now to trace.

Ice as spectacle

Claiming firsts is always dangerous, particularly in

regards to such a shape-shifting continent as Antarctica,

where an initial sighting of land can be later revealed

as an optical illusion or misapprehended iceberg, and an

inaugural landing site on the continent can turn out,

when the sea ice has melted, to have been on an island.

When Antarctica began to intrude onto the stage, it was

inevitably in the form of its discarded fragments,

icebergs. The London pantomime Omai (1785), for example,

purported to tell the story of a Polynesian man who

travelled on Cook’s journeys, including his

circumnavigation of the Antarctic. The spectacular

scenery by Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg featured a

‘dreary Ice Island’, where the characters encounter a

‘Variety of Dangers’, such as a polar bear attack

(O’Keefe and Shields 2004 [1785]: 15). Five years later,

a production entitled English Heroism that opened in

Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London offered a scene, based

on an actual incident, of a frigate in far southern

waters surrounded by ‘Stupendous FLOATING ISLANDS OF ICE’

(Advertisement, London World, 14 June 1790: 1). At the time

of these two performances, nothing had been seen of the

Antarctic but floating ice—the continent itself was still

speculation.

By 1841, when a melodrama entitled The South Polar

Expedition was performed at the Royal Victoria Theatre

(now known as the Theatre Royal) in Hobart, Tasmania,

Antarctica had been seen and trodden upon a number of

times. The melodrama was inspired by the arrival in the

city of a returning British Antarctic exploring

expedition, led by James Clark Ross. Ross, and the

second-in-command, Francis Crozier, were characters in

the play. The script, written by an anonymous first-time

author, has been lost, but the playbill promises ‘an

entirely new melodrama’, with Act 2 featuring a ‘splendid

ice landscape’, including views of features encountered

by the expedition, such as Mount Erebus, icebergs and the

obligatory animal attack, this time by penguins.

Like Omai, then, the melodrama impressed audiences

primarily with its scenery. While reviewers complained

about various points of the acting and the script, the

staging drew only praise in the press: The scenery was

‘as cold looking as could be wished’, the aggressive

five-foot penguins were accepted without much comment,

and the concluding allegorical tableau, showing

Britannia, Fame and Science against the polar landscape,

was ‘well conceived, complimentary and cleverly managed’

(Hobart Town Advertiser 7 May 1841: 2). Of course, besides the

‘sailors in the pit’ just returned from their journey

south (Colonial Times 11 May 1841: 2), few of the ‘densely

crowded house’ (Hobart Town Courier 11 May 1841: 2) could

have had any immediate idea of what the Antarctic ice

looked like: Captains Ross and Crozier did not choose to

see themselves performed. The expedition’s chief medical

officer, Robert M’Cormick, sitting in a front box, was

generally unimpressed: ‘It was but rather indifferently

got up’, he wrote sniffily, ‘and not much better acted’

(1884: 198).

While the play ostensibly celebrated the discovery

of new territory for inclusion in the British Empire, its

epilogue, reproduced in the Hobart Town Advertiser (7 May

1841: 2), is at pains to highlight the role in the events

of Tasmania, then a remote British colony still

officially known as Van Diemen’s Land. The allegorical

figure of Britannia, addressing Ross, predicts the day

when, Britain itself having succumbed to the inevitable

fate of imperial centres and ‘crumbled to dust’, Tasmania

should take on this mantle and ‘shine the Britain of this

hemisphere’. With the discovery of Antarctic lands,

Tasmania’s own identity alters: The relative nature of

south becomes apparent as what was a far southern

periphery is transformed into a potential centre. The

theatrical representation of Antarctica not only

domesticated the alien space of the icescape, but also

exoticized the familiar place of ‘home’.

The imperial prophecy with which The South Polar

Expedition concludes is taken up in a later theatrical

vision of the Antarctic, the pantomime Australis; or , the

city of Zero. This elaborate event was performed over

1900–1 in Sydney to celebrate Australian federation, with

the libretto co-written by the playwright Bernard

Epinasse and the theatrical entrepreneur J. C.

Williamson. Promoted as ‘An Entirely Original, Musical

and Spectacular, Pantomimic Extravaganza of the future’

(Epinasse and Williamson 1900: 1), it is set in the year

2000, by which time only Australia and Antarctica have

survived an apocalyptic war unscathed. The action, which

combines scientific and sentimental romance, satire of

contemporary events and a serious sense of imperial duty,

sees a diverse cast of characters journey to the

Antarctic via an airship called Australis. Following a

dramatic whirlpool scene, a comic ballet of polar animals

and the inevitable animal attack (bears again)—the ‘king’

of Australia declares sovereignty over the far south.

‘We’re thinking of extending our territory’, he

announces, ‘and the South Pole is about the only place

left to annex nowadays’; Antarctica is readily

incorporated into a ‘Great Empire of the South’ (Epinasse

and Williamson 1900: 47, 69).

As in The South Polar Expedition, the ice continent

has two functions in the play: In narrative terms, it is

territory still available to be claimed, a potential

colony’s colony; in terms of performance, it is a

reliable source of spectacle. One theatre critic

emphasized the ‘glitter and gorgeousness’ of the scenery

(The Bulletin 5 Jan. 1901: 8), including the ice-fields:

If that show is only a dreary production backed

by a mass of beautiful scenery, it is evident

that the public has forgiven the dreariness for

the sake of the scenery … its Polar bears … have

evidently got a solid hold upon the public soul.

(The Bulletin 19 Jan. 1901: 8).

Theatre in the ice

Ironically, at the turn of the twentieth century, while

Antarctica’s function was still confined on stage to the

exotic and the spectacular, for those living on the

southern ice itself theatre became a means of

domestication and familiarization. Only a few months

after Australis closed its run, the British National

Antarctic Expedition, led by Scott, departed on its

journey south, taking with it a donated theatrical kit

complete with make-up and costumes. Scott had loved

theatre since he was a boy. His sister was an actress and

he took part enthusiastically in naval shipboard

theatricals. As a naval man, he would likely have been

familiar with the strong tradition of plays in

overwintering Arctic expeditions, as a means of

countering the dreaded ‘polar depression’.

In June 1902, the beginning of their first long

Antarctic winter, the expedition members launched the

‘Royal Terror Theatre’ (named after the extinct volcano,

Mount Terror). With the men living on their ice-entrapped

ship, the Discovery, their nearby hut became both

practice room and performance space. Following several

weeks of secret rehearsals, the doors opened one evening

just after midwinter, the audience making its way across

the sea ice through darkness, wind, snowdrift and a

temperature of -26 degrees Fahrenheit (-32 degrees

Celsius). A two-foot-high stage erected on potato cases

was lit by a row of footlights (Wilson 1966: 15). Strict

rank segregation was observed, with officers in front-row

chairs and crew on benches behind; the cast itself was

drawn from the crew, with the second officer directing.

When the audience had taken its place, Scott had to own

to ‘having seen theatricals under far less realistic

conditions’ (1905: 376).

The night’s main offering was entitled Ticket of

Leave, a ‘screaming comedy in one act’. Scott’s summary

of the performance gives few clues to the action—‘one

supposes there is a plot’, he writes, ‘but it is a little

difficult to unravel’ (37–8). More striking in his

description is how much the audience as well as the cast

enjoyed performing, recreating the West End in unlikely

conditions. Nuts and oranges were advertised during the

interval, taxi cabs were called for as the audience left

the theatre and one man shaved off his beard and

moustache for the occasion. The acts of both putting on

and attending a performance thus provided a comforting

fiction for the isolated men, allowing them to pretend

for a night that they could enjoy the luxuries of home.

This was reinforced by the play that they chose to

perform. Most accounts have assumed that the men wrote

Ticket of Leave themselves. A different story is told,

however, by the fragmented remains of the handwritten

script. These consist of four damaged pages, retrieved

during a restoration process sixty years after they were

written, from a frozen rubbish heap outside of the hut

(into which they were presumably thrown when no longer

needed). The play Scott’s men performed was a slightly

adapted version of an 1862 farce by popular British

dramatist Watts Phillips, focusing on the return from

exile of two convicts, one benign, one sinister. Both

must disguise themselves, for different purposes—thus the

play is, to some degree, explicitly about exile and

homecoming, performance and identity. Whether Scott’s men

recognized it or not, Ticket of Leave presented a

narrative that echoed their own. Imprisoned in their

icebound hulk, isolated for years from society, the men

both longed for and feared their return home, often

speculating about the reception they would receive and

the changes that may have taken place in their absence,

and expressing veiled anxieties about the kinds of masks

they may have to assume in order to perform adequately

the role of ‘returning polar explorer’. By recreating the

West End in their Antarctic hut, the men rehearsed their

own return from exile, a performance replicated in the

play they watched that night.

[{figure1}]

When Scott returned several years later to lead his

second polar expedition, he inadvertently produced a

narrative that would go on to dominate stage

representations of the far south. The theatrical

potential of the attempt to reach the Pole was recognized

from its beginning—or even beforehand. In the safety of

their base, the men ‘pre-enacted’ probable scenes of

their journey for the cinematographer Herbert Ponting. In

the event Scott’s team were beaten to their goal by the

Norwegian Antarctic Expedition led by Roald Amundsen, and

all members of the British team, including Scott, died on

the return leg from starvation, exposure and exhaustion.

When, in early 1913, the British media learned of their

demise, it was quickly termed a ‘tragedy’—a dramatic

genre that, in its classical form, fits the events

remarkably well (Murray 2006: 196–208). Cultural

historian Max Jones points out the theatricality of

illustrations of the event, which focus on key moments,

such as the writing of Scott’s ‘Message to the Public’

(Jones 2003: 126). Lines from this famous message carry

echoes of the famous line from J. M. Barrie’s play Peter

and Wendy—‘We hope our sons will die like English

gentlemen’—and Barrie was a good friend of Scott and

godfather of his son Peter. When the explorer’s journals

were edited for publication, Barrie wrote a ‘Last Scene’

describing the men’s final moments as he believed them to

have occurred (125).

Scott enters the stage

There was a vast difference, however, between

contextualizing the tragic events in the language of the

theatre, and presenting them on stage. This was not

attempted for a couple of decades. According to newspaper

reports, British playwright R. C. Sherriff toyed with the

idea of a play based on the polar tragedy, but dropped it

out of courtesy to Scott’s family (Sunday Express 1930:

n.p.). Outside of Britain this concern was less pressing.

In the mid-1920s, the young Vladimir Nabokov wrote a one-

act verse play about the tragedy entitled The Pole,

published in Berlin in Germany in the Russian émigré

newspaper, Rul ’ (Nabokov 1984). Although the play was

eventually performed, this was not until 1996 (Manhire

2004: 312)—it was written as a closet drama (Frank 2012:

24), and it is unlikely that many in Britain knew of its

existence.

However, a play about Scott that premiered in Berlin

a few years later had far greater effects. Reinhard

Goering’s Die Südpolexpedition des Kapitäns Scott created

a storm in the British press when it was first performed

in 1930. Goering, an eccentric expressionist playwright,

who was, like Nabokov, fascinated by Scott’s journals,

used the expedition narrative to explore his own long-

standing obsessions: human destiny and self-

determination, sacrifice and suicide. Die

Südpolexpedition, which went on to win the prestigious

Kleist prize, drew on classical devices, employing a form

of Greek chorus, and displayed Brechtian self-

consciousness of its own theatricality. The set—designed

by Caspar Neher, more famous for his work on the staging

of Brecht’s plays—seems to have been comparatively

elaborate for the scenes set in cities, but fairly bare

for the Antarctic action, with lighting used to emphasize

the men’s isolation, and props such as tents and sledges

gesturing towards the icescape. Projections designed by

Nina Tokumbet provided a backdrop of stylized bergs

(Willett 1986: 84).

[{figure 2}]

German reviewers, familiar with expressionist

techniques and distanced from the Scott tragedy, greeted

the play warmly on the whole, but responses in the

British media ranged from measured praise to outraged

indignation. An initial review in The Observer declared

that ‘no finer tribute’ had been paid to England by

Germany for some time (23 Feb 1930). A reviewer for the

Sunday Express concurred that the play was a ‘great

tribute’, but objected to its ‘inhuman’ qualities: ‘How

can you dramatise a tract of ice? How can you make human

a vast waste of snow?’ (2 March 1930). Quickly, however,

the press’s attention turned from the qualities of the

performance itself to the negative reactions of Scott’s

friends and relatives, especially his widow Kathleen.

Unsurprisingly, attempts to bring the play to England in

1932, with Russian émigré director Theodore

Komissarzhevsky at the helm, were speedily quashed.

Goering went on to adapt his play text into a

libretto for a twelve-tone opera, with music by Arnold

Schoenberg’s follower Winfried Zillig. The chorus in this

version are dressed as penguins. In an unlikely

anticipation of the computer-animated family musical film

Happy Feet (2006) (directed by George Miller), they dance

as well as sing, and resist human intrusion into their

world (Davis 1987: 376). Entitled Das Opfer (“The

Sacrifice”), it opened in 1937, by which time Goering

himself had committed suicide, and it closed after only a

few performances, possibly because it attracted negative

attention from the National Socialists. The Nazis, who

had imperial ambitions of their own in the Antarctic,

were reportedly suspicious of its pro-British sentiment

as well as its dissonance (396).

Unsurprisingly, none of the dramatizations of

Scott’s story that followed attempted any realistic

representation of the Antarctic environment. The next

response was Douglas Stewart’s verse play The Fire on the

Snow, first performed in 1941. Stewart’s play was written

specifically for radio: While the narrative traces the

polar party’s journey across space, it is sound—words,

silence, what is said and what is not said—that evidently

fascinated the poet Stewart. Like Goering, Stewart was

interested less in the national and political than the

personal and existential resonances of the narrative. As

the men are forced from action to stasis, from the

expanse of the plateau to the confines of the tent,

icescape becomes mindscape: ‘If we had a shovel handy,

Wilson’, reflects the expedition leader, ‘I’d ask you /

To shovel away the snow that’s inside my head, / That’s

where it’s falling now. / My brain’s a snowdrift’

(Stewart 1944: 39). The shift to radio means that the

risk of visually rendering the icescape and the polar

heroes too prosaically is avoided, and the use of blank

verse lends events a sense of dignity and order. It is

not known what Kathleen Scott thought of Stewart’s play,

if she was aware of it, but it is likely that she would

have been much happier with this dramatic rendering of

her husband’s final days.

By the mid-century, however, Kathleen was dead, the

Second World War was over, and attitudes towards

Englishness, imperialism, masculinity, heroism and noble

sacrifice were rapidly changing. An irony of Kathleen’s

long-held opposition to theatrical versions of her

husband’s expedition is that by the time that one

occurred in Britain, his reputation was ripe for attack.

Left-wing British playwright Howard Brenton took up the

challenge with some relish in Scott of the Antarctic, or,

What God Didn’t See, written for the 1971 Bradford

Festival—and ice was his key weapon. The play was set on

a local ice rink, in keeping with Brenton’s interest at

the time in theatre set in ‘public places’. The nature of

the ice-rink space dictated the nature of the performance

(Boon 1991: 51): The size of the arena and the acoustics

required loud, cartoonish, melodramatic roles—perfect for

Brenton’s satire, which is directed more at the

mythologized figure of Scott than the man. The British

polar party, all public-school slang and foolish bravado,

slide and stumble about on snow-shoes, while white

figures on skates—indicating, presumably, the Norwegian

team—whizz past them gracefully.

The ice-rink setting functions in complex ways. It

is, of course, a means of deflating the traditional view

of the expedition as a noble undertaking, revealing the

sublime as ridiculous—Antarctica, in the script, becomes

a ‘dead white land colder than any ice-cream or ice-

lolly’ (Brenton 1972: 79). Although the ice rink provides

a scale that no traditional stage could hope for, this

very gesture towards vastness suggests banality in its

failure; the ice is reduced from the vast exteriority of

the plateau to the mundane interiority of the covered

stadium.

While Brenton’s play politicizes Antarctic history

for the first time on stage, it does not deal with the

contemporary Antarctic politics of his own time. This is

typical of the treatment of Antarctica in the theatre

over the last half-century. The continent becomes a place

through which to explore politics, or to which politics

are imported—metaphorically and historically—rather than

a place with a current politics of its own. The complex

history of competing and overlapping sovereignty claims,

the development of the Antarctic Treaty, the controversy

over the proposed minerals convention in the 1980s and

other geopolitical issues have generated little in the

way of dramatic response.[{Note }]2

The next playwright to look towards the far south,

American Ted Tally in his Terra Nova (first performed in

1977), follows Goering and Stewart in focusing on Scott’s

journey as an exploration of self, meaning and purpose.

By the late twentieth century, however, the notion of the

polar journey as a journey into the self had become an

exhausted cliché. It was also, given the inevitable cast

of characters, a highly gendered cliché, which, with

women at last able to travel to the continent for both

work and leisure, was decreasingly viable. The cliché

could be deployed only if it was self-consciously

acknowledged as such: Tony Kushner does something of this

sort in Angels in America, when his valium-addicted

housewife Harper hallucinates a south polar idyll, a

‘deep freeze for feelings’ where she can escape the

pressures of her everyday life (Kushner 1993: 102).

Antarctica is peripheral, however, to Kushner’s concerns;

playwrights centrally interested in the far south needed

to develop new responses. This was achieved primarily

through innovative approaches to space and place.

Heroic re-enactments

Patricia Cornelius’s Do Not Go Gentle received its first

and, so far, only performance in Melbourne in 2010, the

play text having already won a slew of prizes. The play’s

five central characters—four elderly and one suffering

from early-onset dementia, two of them women—re-enact

Scott’s expedition and simultaneously deal with their own

institutionalization and impending deaths. Do Not Go

Gentle draws part of its power from the incongruities as

well as the surprising similarities of the two parallel

settings, the sublime icescape of ‘Heroic Era’ Antarctica

and the mundane nursing home. In his introduction to the

published play text, director Julian Meyrick recalls

that, while attempting to get the play staged, he was

constantly asked about the setting: ‘“why are the

characters in the Antarctic?” . . ., “why doesn’t

Patricia show they are really in a nursing home?”’ The

characters, Meyrick insists, aren’t ‘“really” anywhere’

(2011: 5). In one sense, of course, they are: They are

really on a stage—something Meyrick made clear in his

eventual use of the bare, warehouse-like performance

space, left empty except for a collapsing roof in a

corner. Gone were the suggestions of place such as

flowing white cloths, piles of snow and wind machines

that characterized earlier performances, even pared-down

ones such as Tally’s and Goering’s. For Meyrick, ‘long

clean traverses of empty space’ are ‘[p]erfect for

Antarctica’ (2010).

The metaphorical and meta-theatrical deployment of

the polar journey had a precedent in Manfred Karge’s

Conquest of the South Pole. Originally written and

performed in German as Die Eroberung des Südpols, Karge’s play

premiered in English translation as part of the Edinburgh

Festival Fringe in 1988, with Alan Cumming in the lead.

Highly non-naturalistic, self-consciously theatrical and

stylized, Conquest follows the attempt of a group of five

unemployed men living in Herne, a former coal-mining town

in Western Germany, to recreate a polar journey in their

attic. They turn, however, not to Scott’s tragic

narrative but to the triumphant Norwegian Amundsen, who

arrived at his destination nearly a month before the

British team, and who returned safely.

The attic where the re-enactment of the play occurs

is one of the few places where coal dust has not

penetrated, and hence the best room in which to hang out

the household washing. The white sheets become, for the

men, glaciers, mountains and ‘waves of ice’—‘you’ll need

to stretch your imagination’, one remarks (Karge 1988:

7). The Antarctic, like the washing, seems untouched by

the blackness that symbolically infiltrates the depressed

industrial town. And Amundsen’s narrative in particular

attracts the men because it is, or at least appears to

them, a record of constant action—in a passage quoted in

the play the explorer identifies periods of forced stasis

and confinement as the worst part of polar travel (4).

Without the opportunity to work, the German men are

metaphorically trapped in their tent. Their embrace of

their parts in Amundsen’s story is an escape, not so much

movement towards as movement away—away from inaction, and

from the desperate repetitions of their lives.

If the Antarctic ice can merge so readily with

mundane interiors—a nursing home, an attic—it is partly

because, in these and other plays about polar journeys,

it acts primarily as an unmarked and featureless icescape

—a setting for human action. Occasional references to

crevasses notwithstanding, it is only very recently that

playwrights and performers have begun to engage

substantially with the three-dimensionality, the

instability, of the ice. This is partly due to growing

consciousness of anthropogenic climate change, alongside

a related move away from primarily metaphorical uses of

the natural environment towards an engagement with its

materiality. Recent theatrical responses to Antarctica

are interested—to return to Pyne’s terms—in the substance

as well as the style of the icescape.

Encountering ice

The growing sense of ice itself as an unpredictable actor

in Antarctic drama reflects increasing access to the

continent for non-scientists in the last two decades,

through either commercial or national channels. Such

access—rare in the past—allows playwrights and

performance a far more immediate sense of the icescape,

and opens the possibility for multi-media performances

incorporating photographic, filmic, sonic and bodily

engagements. The U.S. Antarctic Program, for example,

facilitated the journey south of multimedia performer

Paul Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky, who produced his Terra

Nova: Antarctic sinfonia (2008) as a result; the

Australian programme sponsored choreographer and dancer

Tina Evans, who created works such as Polarity (2011) and

Body of Ice (2011); the New York Public Art Fund

commissioned French artist Pierre Huyghe to direct a

film, A Journey that Wasn’t (2006), which incorporated

footage from his voyage to Antarctic on a chartered ship

and a related musical staged on an ice-rink in Central

Park.

Another prominent example of theatre emerging from

immediate encounters with the southern ice is Moj of the

Antarctic, described on its title page as ‘A one woman

play performed with photography, video, poetry, light,

dance, movement, music, storytelling and song’. Written

by Mojisola Adebayo, a British playwright and performer

of Danish and Nigerian parentage, and first performed in

London in 2006, it tells an adapted version of the real-

life narrative of Ellen Craft, a mid-nineteenth-century

African-American slave who escapes ‘cross-dressed as a

white man’ (Adebayo and Goddard 2008: 142). While the

actual Craft travelled to Britain, Adebayo takes her on

to the Antarctic. As this alteration suggests, the play

based on Craft’s story is not strictly historical, but

incorporates contemporary issues such as climate change,

whaling and the politics of race, gender and sexuality—in

Adebayo’s narrative, the Craft character has a female

lover whose brutal murder catalyses her desperate escape.

Craft in the play becomes ‘Moj’, and the character

is, as Adebayo has acknowledged, a composite of the

playwright herself and the person she imagines Craft to

have been. Like Goering and Tally before her, Adebayo

incorporates visual projections into the performance, but

here it is footage of herself performing as Moj in

Antarctica, taken by visual artist Del LaGrace Volcano.

The title of the play asserts both Adebayo’s and Moj’s

right as black, queer performers to find a place in the

white south, not to possess but rather to be possessed by

the continent—to be ‘of the Antarctic’. Her play imagines

a role in the continent’s history for those who were

historically excluded, marginalized or erased.

[{figure 3}]

Throughout the play, Adebayo evokes comparisons and

contrasts between Africa and Antarctic, drawing on and

sometimes undermining their stereotypical associations

with black and white. The play begins with a traditional

West-African storyteller singing of two continents joined

in deep geological history and an impending

climatological future. This relationship between the two

continents re-appears during the subsequent narrative of

Moj’s escape. ‘For an explorer today’, another character

advises her, ‘there’s only two places left to conquer.

It’s Africa or the ice. And I can’t see you in the heart

of darkness somehow’ (Adebayo 2008: 177). Heading instead

into ‘the heart of whiteness’ (178), Moj finds in the

icescape something quite unexpected, a place she can feel

at home: ‘[U]nder all this white / Antarctica is a broken

rock as Black as my great-grandfather … White is a cover

up / Is a beautiful lie. / This place is not white but

orange and pink and blue’ (185). Once ensconced in a hut,

however, Moj has to deal with the much less homely

environment created by her fellow sailors: She is

required to perform ‘the most southerly minstrel show

ever’ (182), deliberately echoing a concert that Scott’s

men performed a couple of months after Ticket of Leave.

Choosing this ironic moment to reclaim her identity, Moj

undresses and exits the hut with Lawrence Oates’s famous

line: ‘“I am just going outside and may be some time”’

(188). [{Note }]2 The storyteller’s song ends the play,

predicting again a future of melting ice (190).

A visit to Antarctica is not, however, a

prerequisite for producing work dealing with the

materiality, alongside the symbolism, of the Antarctic

ice. Premiering in Wellington, New Zealand, in 2008,

Lynda Chanwai-Earle’s Heat signalled an obvious concern

with its own material effects: Using wind and solar

power, it claimed to be the first production to be self-

sufficient in terms of energy (Anon. 2010). Set in 1999,

Heat focuses on two scientists—a physicist studying ozone

depletion, and a biologist studying penguins. They are

lovers, grieving over the loss of their child, while

wintering in a hut next to a penguin colony at the edge

of the Ross Ice Shelf. Their space is interrupted by the

entry of an emperor penguin (played in the New Zealand

performances by a naked male actor), who becomes a

surrogate son and partner, turning the relationship into

a strange love-triangle (the play is partly based on

Carson McCullers’s novella The Ballad of the Sad Café).

[{figure 4}]

Antarctica as spectacle is studiously excluded from

the stage, which is entirely taken up by the crowded hut.

The hut wall, according to the production notes, are ‘the

edge of this world’, only a window and an obscured door

letting in ‘eerie blue light’—the stark juxtaposition of

homeplace and alien space. Outdoor scenes are played

downstage, beside ‘a large real block of ice’ (Chanwai-

Earle, 2011: n.p,). While the human narrative is

essentially hopeful—despite, or rather because of, the

surreal events of winter, the couple can move forward—the

action of the ice works as a counterpoint. Although the

ice block is not mentioned again in the stage directions,

it presumably remains downstage, slowly but inexorably

liquefying at its edges throughout the performance, due

to the effects of heat.

‘How can you dramatise a tract of ice?’ asked the

Sunday Express’ newspaper reviewer in 1930 in response to

Goering’s daring attempt to put Antarctica into a

theatre. Heat gives perhaps the most convincing reply in

the early twentieth-first century: You put it on stage

and, while human actors go about dealing with their

personal crises, you watch it melt.

Notes

1 See Nielsen (2013: 16) for a discussion of this shift,

and for detailed analyses of a number of the twentieth-

century plays mentioned in this survey.

2 There are exceptions: For example, there are the short

plays The Frozen Continent (2008) and Passion for the

Antarctic (2011) by Jason Kendall Moore and Consuelo León

Wöppke developed for pedagogical use in tertiary

settings.

3 Oates was one of the members of Scott’s team. Aware

that he was near death and holding up the progress of the

party, he walked out of the expedition tent knowing that

he would not survive.

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Captions

Figure 1 One of the defrosted pages of Ticket of Leave—

the script spent more than half a century in a frozen

rubbish heap.

Figure 2 Scene from Reinhard Goering’s Die

Südpolexpedition des Kapitäns Scott, showing projections

by Nina Tokumbet. Paul Bildt (stage right) plays Roald

Amundsen.

Figure 3 Del LaGrace Volcano’s image of Mojisola Adebayo

as ‘Moj of the Antarctic’.

Figure 4 Byron Coll as Bob the emperor penguin in Lynda

Chanwai-Earle’s Heat.