Abstract
Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition is a watershed moment within Antarctic history. The five-member party’s failed return from the South Pole resulted in renewed public fascination with the Antarctic across the Commonwealth.
As Freddie Rokem notes in Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre, “collective identities, whether they are cultural/ethnic, national, or even transnational, grow from a sense of the past; the theatre forcefully participates in ongoing representations and debates about these pasts” (3). After publication of Scott’s diary and other expeditioner accounts, the expedition’s historical legacy largely centered on societal discourses inclusive of shared national identities, gender and an individual’s tragic perseverance against fate. Over the remainder of the twentieth century, several playwrights engaged within the public discourse by re-examining Scott’s historical legacy as a significant cultural marker along these topics.
This paper’s investigation explores three mid-to-late twentieth century plays responding to the Terra Nova expedition’s archive: Australian poet Douglas Stewart’s radio play The Fire on the Snow (1941), British playwright Howard Brenton’s early-career dramatic work, Scott of the Antarctic: Or, What God Did Not See (1971), and New Zealand playwright Stuart Hoar’s Scott of the Antarctic (1989). This paper considers each playwright’s methods in calibrating the expedition’s mythos within society against existent historical archive, often confronting their audience’s desire to directly hear from absent historical figures through a significant restructuring of the narrative’s communication and use non-realistic theatrical devices.
Works Cited
Rokem, Freddie. Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre. U of Iowa P, 2000.