18 April 2008 Written by Stephe Harrop Print This Post  Email This Post

Tony Harrison is a great stage-poet, who knows that the theatre is a place for straight talk, open eyes and hard truths. Fram is a show that very palpably does things to its audience, which is made to laugh, talk back, shout out and confess to its collective lack of competence in ancient Greek. It’s also confused, frustrated, shocked, moved and bored. But, most importantly, and most unusually for a National audience, it’s actually made to think.

The play deals with survival, the means by which we stay alive, and keep hope alive, facing the icy expanse of inevitable annihilation. For the play’s characters, survival is variously dependent upon beauty, art, compassion, cannibalism, and the company of strange bedfellows.

Fram is a brute of a play, which abounds in prologues, epilogues, arguments and interludes, but lacks a unifying dramatic heart. Actors declaim verses debating the merits of actors declaiming verses as a means of changing the world. Stages within stages overflow with competing images of aspiration, atrocity, condemnation and despair. Classicist-cum-playwright Gilbert Murray (an amiable, if underwhelming Jeff Rawle) rises from the dead to stage a play about his hero, arctic explorer and humanitarian Fridtjof Nansen. But his characters keep getting away from him, transgressing the boundaries of decency and decorum, and unsettling his certainties about the civilizing power of art.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Harrison doesn’t always seem to enjoy ventriloquising the virtuous Murray’s ‘genteel Muse’. All too often, this unlikely collision of poetic voices makes the play’s learnedness sound like pedantry, its moral fervour sound like moralising. As the resuscitated Sybil Thorndike prophetically warns: ‘I hope she won’t prove so genteel / she won’t do justice to the way that people feel’. The play has moments of great beauty, including Fram herself, rising from Bob Crowley’s luminous ice-fields, but these are mingled with passages of astonishing tedium. Everyone says everything that’s remotely important (and plenty that isn’t) at least three times, making a long play feel even longer, especially as the cast starts to tire.

The company performs gallantly, though some are obviously out of their depth with both subject matter and metre. Sian Thomas plays to the gallery, and pleases them excessively, as a twitchy Sybil Thorndike, but doesn’t quite rise to the dramatic metamorphoses demanded by her role. Jasper Britton, as Nansen, attacks the verse with clarity, presence and guts, and very nearly makes it to the Pole before his stamina finally gives out. Mark Addy handles his text and gags with the muscular finesse of a Harrison pro. His brooding, bewildered Hjalmar Johansen almost succeeds in anchoring the heart of this drifting show. The darkly deft comedy of his duologue with an empty mask, the ghoulish panache of his cabaret of cadavers, is skilful and guileless and satisfyingly theatrical. He’s the funny man at the funeral, making the corpse sit up and talk, and his confident, confiding, confrontational delivery of Harrison’s verse has serious emotional clout.

Formally, the play looks to the harrowing messenger speeches of the ancient Greeks, as Murray insists: ‘A messenger speech / reaches depths in the heart mere pictures never reach’. Messenger after messenger appears, recounting, or attempting to recount, the horrors they’ve witnessed. But the play lacks the reflective, communal voice that could synthesise and draw meaning from these disparate tales of woe. As it is, Fram remains a fragmentary tragedy of individuals, individually seeking salvation, comprehension or redemption. Johansen’s grisly corps of corpses is the closest we come to the tragic chorus that might do justice to Harrison’s massive theme. In this tragedy without a chorus, Murray’s open-mouthed mask remains mute, and no amount of impassioned testimony can bring the sprawling drama to any sort of resolution.

Fram runs at the National Theatre until 22 May.

Directed by Tony Harrison and Bob Crowley
Set design by Bob Crowley
Costume design by Fotini Dimou
Lighting by Mark Henderson
Choreography by Wayne MacGregor
Music by Richard Blackford
Video by Jon Driscoll

Image Top: Jasper Britton (Fridtjof Nansen). Photograph © copyright of Nobby Clark.