When a stranded Polar expedition is threatened with slow death, its crew decides to stage William Shakespeare’s THE TEMPEST aboard their ship. The struggle to perform becomes for them the struggle to survive – a way not to go mad in inhumanely harsh conditions. The polar region, like Shakespeare’s fictional island, is a space where people must confront demons, alienation and isolation. Survival there is like surviving a void – it no longer matters who you might be, the ice crushes everyone the same. Interpersonal relations collapse, values are upturned and isolated Polar explorers are forced to face the prospect of annihilation together. Total annihilation, their experiences erased, their remains unidentifiable. Their captain, reminiscent of Prospero, possessed by the ambition to reach the pole, only has one motto: “Onwards!”. In the name of going beyond the limits of what is feasible he is ready to use the natives, to eat his own dogs and to stage plays in freezing conditions. He believes that meaning is hidden within the void, even when he and his own people, starving to death, are collapsing around the mast of their sinking ship.
EXPEDITION TEMPEST is a tale of struggle against the void. The play combines Shakespeare’s text with fragments taken from diaries penned by members of polar expeditions. Crew members’ lives interweave with the fates of the characters in The Tempest, and the polar wastelands merge with the theatrical space. Survival in polar regions turns out to essentially be a performative experience. In the end, as Tomasz Kubikowski states in his book ZJADANIE PSÓW / DEVOURING DOGS, “each one of us has their own Arctic” and there we “are forced to perform”.
This performance follows the “work in progress” that was awarded the New Yorick Prize at the 28th International Shakespeare Festival. The jurors acknowledged how the show allowed audiences to experience isolation and agonizing pain in vivid, memorable ways with minimalistic use of theatrical tools.
The play text uses fragments of William Shakespeare’s THE TEMPEST, translated into Polish by Piotr Kamiński, Tomasz Kubikowski’s essay ZJADANIE PSÓW and diaries from polar expeditions penned by John Franklin, Fridtjof Nansen, William Parry, Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton translated into Polish by Alexander Dulak.
