Fram

Synopsis

A play about the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nanse. 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.

Our Review:

18 April 2008

Where to begin? Tony Harrison’s new play Fram at the National, part of the £10 Travelex season, is not so much a drama as a theatrical gallimaufry of an adventure story, global freezing, literary reputation, liberal do-gooding, the powerlessness of art and the vanity of human wishes.

Written entirely in rhyming verse – the tone hovers between trite pantomime couplet and a joltingly overcrowded metrical system – the show starts in Westminster Abbey, where the ghosts of the classicist Gilbert Murray (Jeff Rawle) and the actress Sybil Thorndike (Sian Thomas) summon the story of the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen (Jasper Britton), who sailed to the North Pole in his specially built boat, the Fram, and later worked for the League of Nations as a figurehead for famine relief in Russia in the 1920s.

How this hangs together is not entirely clear, but Harrison has obviously decided not to worry about dramatic neatness any more than his co-director and...

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Latest User Review

fred - 22 May 2008:

Appalling. Dreadful play and dreadfully directed. Why did no-one at the National see this disaster coming ? A great waste of acting talent. ...

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