THEATRE REVIEW

NOVEMBER 2024 | Volume 245

 

Irish actor Aiden Dooley’s one-man play about Irish Antarctic explorer Tom Crean has been touring the world since 2001, so you’d expect a confident, accomplished performance with maybe the odd lapse or three into self-commentary or improvised audience interaction. And that’s exactly what you get in Dooley’s presentation of his Crean stories for Western Gold.

At the start, Dooley points out that Crean accompanied both Scott and Shackleton—the two best-known Antarctic explorers—on their expeditions during the first two decades of the twentieth century, and accomplished some unbelievably heroic feats, yet is relatively unknown. So the point of the play is to introduce him and his heroism to us, and to celebrate him. At the same time, of course, the point is to impress us with Dooley’s own bravura acting and tour de force storytelling. It doesn’t hurt that both the actor and his subject are Irishmen, with their cultural propensity for vivid, colourful language.

In front of an impressionistic set—a large sled hangs overhead—Dooley tells two stories with no props. He does, helpfully, describe the clothing the polar explorers would wear, and puts each piece on so we have a visual image of the man, though not of the frigid, barren, murderous environment. The two stories, one from Scott’s expedition, the other from Shackleton’s, are both about the terrible consequences of plans gone awry, and the need for Crean and others to overcome extraordinary obstacles to save their compatriots.

Dooley narrates in what I can only describe as an Irish-accented roar. Though the two stories involve different emergencies caused by different conditions, they share a similar dynamic. Disaster strikes, men die or are threatened with death, and heroic rescues occur as a result not of technology, which is essentially non-existent, but from superhuman efforts. Crean is in the forefront of both rescues. And both times, he tells us, he just missed by hours a blizzard that would have killed him and doomed the men he helped rescue as well.

As much as I admired Dooley’s acting, and the dramatic arc of the stories, I would have preferred more contrast in his theatrical approaches to the two. I was glad to learn about Tom Crean, though, and his heroics. In this time when so many people are attracted to false gods and their promises of magical solutions, it’s good to be reminded that real people can accomplish real things through real selflessness and effort.

 

 

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