Fram

Reliance on devices like the photograph and slidewill lead, I rather fear, to linguistic suicide.We must keep on challenging language to engagewith all we suffer from in this new modern age.This epic sweep of a play takes us from a contemporary Westminster Abbey to the Arctic ship Fram – or Forward – specially built by the famous Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen who, with his suicidal companion, Johansen, makes a bid on foot for the North Pole in the 1890s. Though incompatible, they share a bear fur sleeping-bag through the long winter. Nansen, still haunted by Johansen's ghost is appointed to the League of Nations. As a figurehead of Russian famine relief in 1922, he conducts the first celebrity campaign, searching for means, however shocking, to make people care. Tony Harrison's major new work for the theatre, Fram, premiered at the National Theatre in April 2007.