The Last South: Pursuit of the Pole

Sometimes theatre just gets everything right – a superb cast, clear design, and storytelling so utterly absorbing that it just hoists you right out of your usual reality and fills your imagination with something extraordinary.

You could, of course, argue that’s it like shooting fish in a barrel, making theatre out of something as inherently dramatic as the race to the South Pole. But that would be missing the point, for there are plenty of shows based on real-life events that fail to engage, fail to move, even though they ought to compel and fascinate. No, what “The Last South” achieves is a truly mesmeric experience, based on little more than two men, some journals and a couple of folding chairs.

The Englishman Robert Falcon Scott and the Norwegian Roald Amundsen could hardly be more different. Scott (Adrian Lukis) comes across as an excessively noble, ludicrously optimistic gentleman, endlessly banging on about the sheer excellence of his team’s character, and in fact refusing to see their endeavour as a ‘race’ at all. Amundsen (Jamie Lee), on the other hand, is quite up-front about wanting to beat Scott to the Pole, and comes across as an attractively laid-back figure, who is nevertheless extremely focused on winning. It’s an intriguing battle, then, as the men take turns to reveal the hopes, privations and mental torment that made up the lot of these early twentieth-century explorers.

With a taut, incisive script by G.M. Calhoun, based entirely on authentic journals kept at the time, “The Last South” uses stark design and the simplest of techniques to create a shining, deeply engrossing theatrical experience.