OneTouch Theatre, Eden Court, Inverness, 7 May 2008

Last South

AMBITION is the eighth deadly sin. The drive for achievement has seen men do many great things and rise to undreamt-of heights. The Last South showed in stark relief the dark side of ambition. It was ambition that sent Donald Campbell cartwheeling to his death on Conniston, that froze the flesh of Mallory and Irvine on Everest, and it was ambition that lured Scott and his companions to an icy tomb.

This production was taken from the diaries of Polar explorers John Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen as they raced towards one of the great last challenges on earth, the honour of being the first to set foot on the south pole.

In the drama David Burt as Scott and Christian Olliver as Amundsen both performed extracts from the diaries of these two very different but equally determined individuals. The extracts where well chosen and skilfully portrayed the characteristics of both men.

Scott the romantic idealist, seeing his men as heroes and believing that their combined will could overcome any obstacle. Amundsen, more pragmatic choosing the tried and tested method of depending on the strength of huskies rather than the muscle of men to get to the pole.

“The great thing about dogs,” Amundsen remarks, “is dog can be fed on dog.” Any man who can say that has little room in his mind for compassion. The play perfectly reflected the end of one era and the beginning of another.

Scott’s values were entrenched in the beliefs of his class, a public school stoicism permeating his attitudes, whereas Amundsen, the younger man, was an efficient realist. The drama unfolded in 1912, at a time when, just two years later, the horrors of the First World War would traumatise a generation and end forever any faith in the ethics of Eton’s playing fields.

Both Burt and Olliver put in fine and very believable performances as the two explorers. Burt depicted very clearly Scott’s internal turmoil as he struggled to maintain his composure as disaster stared him in the face and the men he admired slowly died around him.

This was a fine performance as the sensitive Scott gradually confronted the realisation that the disaster he saw before him was largely of his own making. Scott is by far the more colourful character and success is never as lively a tale to tell as failure but, never the less, Olliver’s Amundsen was totally convincing.

The play was actually much closer to a dramatic reading than a drama, with the action largely confined to both men alternately reading extracts from their diaries. As such the play perhaps lacked a dramatic impact and certainly dragged a little in the mid-section when it was difficult to follow the rapidly unfolding talk as both men read long extracts from their journals.

Possibly a change of pace or scene in the play would have brought more impact to certain sections. That said, the play came to a gripping and moving conclusion as Scott slowly succumbed to frostbite and despair in the last quarter of the play to produce a memorable conclusion. Overall another great success in Eden Court’s series of Fringe escapees, and a good use of the smaller space offered by the OneTouch Theatre.

© John Burns, 2008

Links

• Eden Court Theatre
• The Last South