Do Not Go Gentle ...

Patricia Cornelius

• Publisher: Currency Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781925210309
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

In this wondrous play, Scott's ill-fated Antarctic expedition is a metaphor for the elusive journey of five elderly people facing the final leg of their travels. Scott's passage across the Antarctic, as he confronts a landscape of ice and perilous weather, powerfully parallels their courage and inevitable defeat. Yet with unbroken spirit, this funny, angry, defiant group grapple with the big questions of life as they rage against the dying of the light.

ACT ONE

SCENE ONE

An aurora provides a spectacular display of streamers of light, but the landscape, an expanse of ice, chills one to the bones—a cold, godforsaken place.

MARIA, a diva, appears dressed in an elegant, full-length white gown. Her feet are bare on the ice.

She sings: ‘Va, Pensiero’—Giuseppi Verdi (from Nabucco).

Five figures appear. They walk slowly and rhythmically as they trudge across the ice. Their journey is hard, extremely hard, and the rhythm is mesmerising and seductive.

They wear polar gear of the early twentieth century: balaclavas, fur hats, their hands are buried in enormous fur mittens, their feet in reindeer boots, their leggings are strapped, and their bodies are shapeless with layers of clothing. Each of them wears a cloth harness.

The five trekkers come to a stop.

MARIA finishes her song and disappears.

The five stare out at the endless horizon. They are breathless. For some time they breathe as one, creating a peculiar song of their own.

SCOTT finally speaks while his four companions remain fixated on the space before them.

SCOTT: The final leg of our journey, and our courage and endurance is being tested in a way that has and will never be tested again. Five of us pitted against the power and treachery of the sea ice, the difficult surfaces of the snow, the biting winds and blizzards. Five of us terrorised by the hidden crevasses that appear like grins beneath our feet. Five of us, inexorably linked and yet utterly alone. There is no doubt that Amundsen’s plan is a very serious menace to ours. He has a shorter distance to the Pole by sixty miles—I never thought he could have got so many dogs to the ice. His plan of running them seems excellent. Let’s leg it, men.

No-one moves.

BOWERS: I’m cold.

EVANS: I’m cold.

OATES: I’m cold.

WILSON: I’m as warm as toast.

SCOTT: We have laid depots where we have buried horsemeat for our return. I felt some remorse when we dispatched Jehu, and Chinaman, even shooting the fiendish Christopher saddened me a little, but their meat will cook up to a welcomed hoosh for our return journey.

BOWERS: The meat’s as tough as an old boot.

EVANS: It’s cheap.

OATES: I can’t bite through it, not with my teeth.

WILSON: It is a little chewy but it’s not too bad.

SCOTT: After a month of wordless plodding to the crunch of hoof and boot we are rewarded by a breathtaking panorama. Mount Markham towers above us, rising fourteen thousand feet into a clear blue sky. Everyone is in excellent spirits.

EVANS: What the hell are we doing here?

BOWERS: I don’t belong here.

OATES: In this godforsaken place.

WILSON: I don’t mind it myself.

SCOTT: Across undulating ice ridges up to twenty-five feet high we inch our way up the thirty-mile-wide, nine-thousand-foot-high Beardmore Glacier, towing twelve weeks’ of food and oil. There’s no escaping the crevasses, but to tell the truth, I find it decidedly exciting not knowing which step will give way.

OATES: I can’t sleep at night.

WILSON: It’s the groaning.

OATES: And the wheezes.

EVANS: And the farts. Trump...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Playwright’s Biography
• First Production
• Characters
• Do Not Go Gentle...
• Copyright Page