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This epic sweep of a play takes us from a contemporary Westminster Abbey to the Arctic ship Fram – or Forward – specially built by the famous Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen who, with his suicidal companion, Johansen, makes a bid on foot for the North Pole in the 1890s.
Though incompatible, they share a bear fur sleeping-bag through the long winter. Nansen, still haunted by Johansen’s ghost, is appointed to the League of Nations. As a figurehead of Russian famine relief in 1922, he conducts the first celebrity campaign, searching for means, however shocking, to make people care.
Reliance on devices like the photograph and slide
will lead, I rather fear, to linguistic suicide.
We must keep on challenging language to engage
with all we suffer from in this new modern age.
A major new work by Britain’s foremost theatre poet, Tony Harrison, whose many plays for the NT include The Oresteia and The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus. His long poem v. caused a celebrated national controversy.
Dates:
10 April – 22 May
Cast
Hjalmar Johansen : Mark Addy
Fridtjof Nansen : Jasper Britton
ARA Man A : Jim Creighton
Sheldon : Patrick Drury
Ballerina : Viviana Durante
ARA Man B : Steven Helliwell
Poet : Aykut Hilmi
Ruth Fry : Clare Lawrence
Eglantyne Jebb : Carolyn Pickles
Gilbert Murray : Jeff Rawle
Sybil Thorndike : Sian Thomas
ARA Man C : Joseph Thompson
Creative:
Directors: Tony Harrison, Bob Crowley
Set Designer: Bob Crowley
Costume Designer: Fotini Dimou
Lighting Designer: Mark Henderson
Music: Richard Blackford
Choreographer: Wayne McGregor
Video Designer: Jon Driscoll
Sound Designer: Gareth Fry
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