E-mail to a friend Find tickets

Fram

Published Friday 18 April 2008 at 12:10 by Heather Neill

There is something schoolmasterly about Tony Harrison - he doesn’t mind taking the time to knock his lesson home.

He might use all kinds of clever devices to keep the audience interested - film, slides, a revolving ice floe, a beautifully danced ballet solo - but no-one is in any doubt that serious issues are being addressed.

Harrison, whose previous pieces include the exuberant Trackers of Oxyrhynchus and an award-winning Oresteia, here turns to the Norwegian Arctic explorer, scientist, humanitarian and co-founder of the League of Nations, Fridtjof Nansen, whose ship was named Fram (Norwegian for Forward).

In Westminster Abbey the dead Greek scholar and dramatist, Gilbert Murray (a tweely donnish Jeff Rawle), awakens to write a play about Nansen. He and the resurrected Sybil Thorndike cross the river and enter the Olivier on film to appear beside us. There is no sign of stinting on Bob Crowley’s design budget for this latest addition to the £10 Travelex season.

Against the background of famine in post-Revolutionary Russia (with explicit parallels drawn to Africa now) Harrison argues that survival depends on people taking responsibility for each other, that the arts can have a useful role in communicating suffering, but that they can also be merely an escape.

Sian Thomas gives a brilliant, brave, performance as a red-gowned Thorndike demonstrating the power of theatre to change minds by acting a starving Russian. This account of desperation to the point of cannibalism contains Harrison’s most persuasive writing. But his verse can be self-regarding, even self-referential, and the anticipated rhymes become irritating.

Nansen remains part of an argument rather than flesh and blood, despite the vigour of Jasper Britton’s performance. Mark Addy as Nansen’s bear-like companion provides some welcome humour while ballerina Viviana Durante is a perfect, ethereal Aurora. But Fram is mainly a decorative sermon.

E-mail to a friend Find tickets