Two hundred years after the discovery of the Antarctic, the Park 90 presents the story of Earnest Shackleton's epic voyage south from Buenos Aries via South Georgia to the ice cap in order to complete the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition with a crew of 27 men on the wooden hulled Endurance. It is an astonishing story of foolhardy bravery and endeavour to achieve the impossible and survive the forbidding conditions and landscape at sea and on land. It creates equally insurmountable problems to stage such a journey in the tiny black box of Park 90 on an Edinburgh Fringe budget.
Writer Andy Dickinson's play seeks to achieve this feat through two hander play with Shackleton confronted by a Welsh stowaway. We never meet the other twenty six crew members although they feature heavily in the story. The script calls for long passages of narrative to describe first the journey south in 1914 thorough the roaring forties seas until they get trapped in the ice flows. Then the extraordinary escape with three lifeboats and a dingy when the Endurance is crushed and sinks, followed by the journey across the seas to Elephant Island where 22 men are left while six attempt to return to the whaler's on South Georgia. The timeframe spans eighteen months in harsh winters conditions.
