The poet Tony Harrison walks across the ice floes on the rehearsal room floor and nearly falls down a crevasse. “Who designed this set?” he cries in mock indignation. The culprit, designer Bob Crowley, shrugs innocently.
The two men clearly have an easy rapport, born, perhaps, out of facing adversity together: They are working to bring Harrison’s new play, Fram, to the Olivier stage in the National Theatre, London.
In theatrical terms, the enterprise has much of the rash courage of a polar expedition. This play begins with luminaries rising out of their graves in Westminster Abbey, travels to the Arctic and finishes by facing down oblivion.
It is written in rhyming couplets (Harrison writes all his drama in verse) and features Wagnerian stage directions such as “the Arctic wilderness returns”. It is funny and horrifying by turns, charged by a clarion call for compassion and Harrison’s customary vigour of expression (graphic imagery, earthy humour and liberal use of expletives).
Crowley, who is co-directing as well as designing, describes his first reaction to the script as “disbelief”: “It was the most daunting script I had ever picked up. No question. But I would rather climb Everest than go for a walk in the park.”
The title, Fram (“forward” in Norwegian), refers to the ship designed by Fridtjof Nansen. The polar explorer gave his ship a thick, rounded hull so that rather than be crushed by the pack ice, it rose up and drifted with it.
“It’s small: a beautiful, small thing,” says Crowley, who visited the ship in Norway and has to reproduce it on stage. “A brilliant piece of design. It’s like an egg. But the hull is 4-feet thick, made from the strongest part of the tree.”
A hero in Norway, Nansen has been eclipsed in the general imagination by Roald Amundsen, whose achievements overshadowed Nansen’s record for getting to the farthest point north in 1895. But Nansen, having learnt how to survive extreme conditions, switched to helping others survive.
He used his fame to publicise the desperate 1922 famine in Russia. This huge shift in priorities struck Harrison forcefully.
“This man, who was the embodiment of the Darwinian ethic, suddenly became a great humanitarian and the first celebrity fundraiser,” he says.
Survival becomes a key theme in the play. Given this and given that Nansen, his ship and his fundraising campaign are so important, it comes as some surprise to find the opening lines of the play given to Gilbert Murray, the classical scholar and translator of Greek drama.
Murray was also involved in fundraising for the Russian famine. When Harrison realised that Nansen and Murray knew one another, he saw links between the ship and Greek tragedy.
Tragedy’s physical counterpart
“Greek tragedy offers a collective way to address the worst terrors,” he explains. Harrison adapted Aeschylus’s Oresteia for Peter Hall’s famous 1981 masked production in the Olivier theatre.
“It uses the power of poetry and music to take people on a terrifying journey but not leave them defeated by it. I thought about Nansen’s idea of putting a ship into places where ships normally get crushed and designing it so that it lifted and drifted with the ice. And I thought: ‘This is a kind of physical counterpart to the spiritual invention of tragedy.’”
So, while the new play starts comically, with Murray attempting to write a verse drama about Nansen’s exploits, it moves, like the Fram, into icy waters. It describes not only Nansen’s strategies to survive the winter but the desperate attempts of starving Russians to cling to life.
“We’re saturated with imagery and with naturalism,” Harrison says. “The Greeks never show death on stage. Somebody comes on and tells the story. It’s like … the word can seduce the ear into close-up.”
“Maybe it is time for the power of the word to come back,” Crowley adds.
We are, by this stage, in the theatre restaurant, perched on stools. It is early evening and we are surrounded by hubbub. Audience members eat their pre-show suppers just feet away from Tom Stoppard, who is chatting. Harrison and Crowley clearly relish this convivial proximity between theatregoer and theatre-practitioner. The opportunity to engage directly with the audience is what draws both men to work in the Olivier.
“I always go into that theatre with a sense of anticipation,” Crowley says. “It’s like anything can be done there. And it doesn’t impose itself on the event. The play is the thing. It’s at its best when it’s stripped back and spare. There’s nothing safe about it but that’s also why I love it.”
Harrison feels that the design of the Olivier encourages the sort of direct exchange between actor and audience that he prizes. “I love it because the verse opens out to the audience,” he says.
Born in Leeds, he grew up watching popular theatre in which the performers spoke directly to the audience. When he finally saw a conventional play, he recalls being mystified by the fact that the actors faced and spoke to each other.
“I sat there and thought: ‘Why is nobody talking to me? Why are they talking to each other?’ I was brought up on music hall and ... was studying Greek at the age of 12. In Greek drama, the actors can’t talk to each other like that because the mask looks [expletive] in profile. I like a direct relationship between actor and audience.”
In Harrison’s early poems, he talked about the conflict between his working-class background and his passion for poetry and ancient Greek, and paradox runs through much of his work. In Fram, he plays with the contrast between the discipline of his metre and the colloquialism of his vocabulary and uses the rhyming couplets to comic effect.
Tension between despair and hope
But while verse drama allows for a playful relationship with the audience, for Harrison it is also a significant part of the cathartic process. He observes that the formality of verse can enable the writer to engage well with the darkest subjects. He has described rhythm as a “life-support system” — affirmative, inexorable — that enables the brain to contemplate destruction.
“For me, there is a paradox in poetry, which is like the paradox in tragedy,” he explains. “You have the most terrible subject but it’s in a form that is so sensually gratifying that it connects the surviving heart to the despairing intellect.”
This tension between despair and hope runs through Fram and with it the question of how to stare annihilation in the face and survive. And at the end, Harrison turns the drama round to contemplate the future. “I’m asking how we go forward,” he says. “How do we build something the equivalent of the Fram to survive our world?”
“Fram” is on at the National Theatre, London SE1, until May 22.
