George  Weinberg-Harter

San Diego Arts

Ted Talley's "Terra Nova" at 6th @ Penn

"To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite"
By George  Weinberg-Harter
Posted on Apr 23 2008
Last updated Apr 27 2008

The names of notorious rivals – even as with pairs of famous friends, partners, and lovers – are often fated to be yoked forever in legend and history. David and Goliath, Hector and Achilles, Samson and Delilah, Antony and Cleopatra, Abelard and Heloise, Mason and Dixon, Lewis and Clark: You can’t have one without the other.

Such a couple of competitors were the two polar explorers, Captain Robert Falcon Scott of the British Royal Navy and Roald Amundsen of Norway. In the year 1911 each with separate parties of their countrymen set off across Antarctica by different routes in their attempts to become the first human beings to reach the South Pole. Amundsen’s expedition of five, starting off earlier with superior equipment and training, reached the pole a little over a month before Scott’s did, and completed their trip back efficiently and safely. The British team, after suffering many hardships, were disheartened to find a Norwegian flag awaiting them at their goal. All five of them perished attempting the return journey.

Today one may fly by airplane to the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. You might even get a t-shirt there with the two men’s names on it. And it is the Norwegian who properly gets priority billing. (Though perhaps it’s in alphabetical order.) But for decades after Robert Scott’s death, his reputation in the English-speaking world at least (if not in Scandinavia) may have exceeded Roald Amundsen’s. Many seemed to prefer a dead heroic failure to a triumphant survivor.

Perhaps the apogee of Scott hero-worship came 36 years after his death with the harrowing 1948 English film "Scott of the Antarctic." The movie starred John Mills, affable and poignant in the title role, and featured a noble musical score by the great composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. The music was later expanded by Vaughan Williams into his Seventh Symphony ("Sinfonia Antartica" 1953) where the scoring for full orchestra and wind machine was augmented by spoken quotations from Shelley’s "Prometheus Unbound" and Scott’s own final journal, written while he was dying in the snow – read in one recording with considerable emotional effect by Sir Ralph Richardson.

Since then – much in the debunking biographical spirit of Lytton Strachey, whose 1918 book "Eminent Victorians" took the starch out of four heroic Britons of the 19^th century – historians have been chipping away at the Scott hagiography. The premier piece of clear-eyed scholarship is Roland Huntford’s 1979 volume "Scott and Amundsen" (later retitled "The Last Place on Earth" to accord with its 1985 dramatization as a BBC television miniseries). The book "demolishes a legend," said a review in "The Sunday Telegraph," which added, "In death Scott became immortal. Now his reputation and character are torn to shreds." The book makes obvious how the honed professional skills of the Norwegians – their experience gained on their native glaciers during youthful holidays, their ease on skis, their use of sled dogs, their cold-weather survival lore learned from the Inuit – contrasted shockingly with Scott’s amateurish bumbling and such British follies as the doomed attempt to use ponies and the untried technology of motor sledges in sub-zero conditions.

Ted Talley’s 1977 play "Terra Nova" (the name of Scott’s ship) – excellently produced at the 6^th @ Penn Theatre by the Inukshuk Production Company under the sure direction of Marybeth Bielawski-DeLeo – partakes of that same skeptical outlook regarding Scott’s heroics, something that must have been in the air around that time. The drama focuses with laudable compression on Scott’s futile trek with his four companions. Talley’s dramatic narrative begins with the dying Scott (Tom Andrew) in his tent, pitched finally just eleven miles short of potential rescue, writing the last entries in his journal. It ends, of course, at the same place, with two of his men, Bowers (Scott Striegel) and Wilson (Eddie Yaroch) lying near him, also succumbing to hypothermia. The two others, Evans (Tom Hall) and Oates (Ryan Schulze) perish earlier on the return journey.

Between those points the play proceeds by flashbacks and fantasies. Roald Amundsen (Matt Thompson) appears as a sort of spectral chorus, an unseen presence among Scott’s party, commenting on the action, sometimes in colloquy with Scott, often with an ironic or even downright mocking tone – perhaps more a figure of Scott’s worst rivalrous imaginings than a likely portrayal of the Norwegian. Scott’s wife Kathleen (Amanda Cooley Davis) also fades in and out of scenes, more a phantom of memory, recapitulating moments in their courtship and marriage – incongruously dressed in summery Edwardian frocks (the good work of costume designer Kelley Convery) in stark contrast to Scott’s perpetual polar gear.

In the play it is Kathleen (even though she chooses Scott as her husband – with just two years together before he goes off forever – and bears his son) who voices the most sensible questions about and objections to the whole mad scheme of polar exploration (objections that may well occur to you, and certainly do occur to me). "To me it’s all nonsense, the South Pole," she says. "A place where you might be killed at any instant is a place not worth going to at all!" And then, even more tellingly, Talley makes her say of Scott’s celebrity, of his example to the young: "I mean the danger of foolish ideas seeping into immature minds. The idea that daring is more to be respected than their own precious safety. That duty and honor should be held above an independent spirit, and that patriotism is more important than thinking for themselves. We shall have a whole generation of adventurers, Captain Scott, nurtured by you."

The obvious implication here is one that often comes to mind when considering the death of Scott and his men, and their posthumous glory in the face of defeat, in its historical context. The news of their deaths reached England only fifteen months before the precipitating events of the First World War in which up to a million British military men – a dying generation of adventurers – were sent to their own deaths by an often uncomprehending and unprepared leadership. One of the war’s casualties, the poet Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), wrote, in a poem about the horrors of those combat deaths, of "The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est/Pro patria mori" ("It’s sweet and fitting to die for the fatherland"). One might see in the needless deaths of the little Scott party a kind of proleptic microcosm of the patriotic megadeaths in that subsequent war. Four of Scott’s five were military men of various ranks and classes – three English, one Scottish, and one Welshman. One of the last lines that Scott wrote in his journal went: "Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman." Just Englishmen? But it’s great stuff. It has the ring of Shakespeare’s Saint Crispin day speech in "Henry V." Yet at the same time it is one of the all-time CYA jobs in the sorry history of catastrophic mismanagement.

Inukshuk’s cast of players is a fine one. Tom Andrew’s Scott, with his sad, haunted eyes, scribbling on in the encroaching cold, sets a pathetic tone that informs his whole portrayal. Indeed, in all representations of Scott – in books, on stage, on screen – whether shown to a be a beautiful loser or just a jerk, that air of pathos always seems to prevail. Talley’s version of Scott is certainly anti-heroic if nothing else. The play’s depiction of the expedition emphasizes a kind of delusional hysteria even in their happiest moments of fellowship. And it quicky descends from there into squabbling, recriminations, privation, hideous suffering, grim martyrdom, madness, and, of course, death. Only vignettes are shown as they slog hundreds of miles, man-hauling (the very word is like torture) their sleds across ice and snow for nineteen weeks. There is almost a kind of masochism to this British approach (perhaps engendered by English public school sadism) that makes the sensible Norwegian methods (which Scott and his men condemn snootily as unsportsmanlike, "not playing the game") seem like a romp by comparison. And to emphasize this, the phantasmal but robust figure of Matt Thompson’s towering, toothy, smug Amundsen stalks them through the play.

Yaroch’s peevish Dr.Wilson and Schulze’s manfully stricken Captain Oates (whose suicidal last words – "I am just going outside and may be some time."– rank as one of the supreme English stiff-upper-lip moments in history) are well and clearly played. Hall as the wounded Welsh Petty Officer "Taff" Evans excellently conveys his woe and increasing befuddlement. Striegel puts a feather in his cap playing Lieutenant "Birdie" Bowers as an engagingly plucky Scots bantam. And Davis’ Kathleen captures, with cultured, classy poise and cutglass accent, the intellectual and aesthetic perceptiveness of Scott’s wife, who seems in so many ways his moral and mental superior that their relationship in the play feels downright Shavian.

Mark Helmuth’s set design is spare and effective, as the playwright specified it should be. Much of the antarctic ambience is conveyed by the lighting and sound design of Bonnie Breckenridge. And Amy Reams’ properties design – especially the convincing sled, and such equipment as sextant and surveying gear – add convincing detail.

And, as ever, Scott gets the last word. Despite the revisionist flood of facts that overwhelms his hitherto inflated reputation, the moving prose of his last journal entries, penned with astonishing inspiration in extremis, will live. You may hear his words intoned whenever Vaughan Williams’ Seventh Symphony is played:

"I do not regret this journey; we took risks, we knew we took them, things have come out against us, therefore we have no cause for complaint."

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About the author: George Weinberg-Harter George Weinberg-Harter has been active in San Diego theatre since childhood, appearing in many local stage productions as well as doing graphic art for them. He has helped start theatre companies, authored and co-authored a number of plays produced locally and is a co-founder of the Fellow Calligraphers of San Diego. He is a member of the Actors Alliance of San Diego, the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle, and the San Diego Press Club, which has presented him with its 2007 First Place Excellence in Journalism Award for Drawing or Illustration.
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