Theatre

Fram
Until May 22
This event has finished
National Theatre, Olivier, South Bank, London, SE1 9PX
Rating:
© Nobby Clark
By Caroline McGinn

Posted: Mon Apr 21
Tony Harrison’s baffling verse drama is supposedly about Arctic explorer and celebrity Fridjtof Nansen – a sort of fin de siècle Bob Geldof, raising awareness of famine in the Volga, fêted by arty types. But its dominant subject is more intellectually adventurous: aesthetic representations of suffering from the classical scream-mask of tragedy to present-day Kurdish refugees.

The interest in aesthetics explains, perhaps, the batty and over-extended framing device, which takes us to Westminster Abbey where the ghost of naff classical translator Gilbert Murray walks. Murray, once he’s finished bitching about TS Eliot and Tony Harrison, coyly informs us he’s writing a verse drama called ‘Fram’ (also the name of Nansen’s ship). So he raises the ghost of actress Sybil Thorndike (the wonderfully arch Sian Thomas) and hops over to the NT, where you’d be forgiven for expecting the play to begin.

But, as scene after scene slowly slips its anchor, it becomes clear that the play is, disastrously, more interested in theatricality’s media and message, than the characters who man the stage. Murray and Thorndike bicker longwindedly about being a playwright and a player within a play. Nansen (Jasper Britton) repeatedly delivers the same speech. A contemporaneous ballet is reconstructed on another stage within the stage. Thorndike, in a fit of pique, imitates a famine victim (superbly). Oh, and at one point some giant photos of emaciated dead famine victims sit up and giggle. Is it to question the truth-value of the image? Or, more crassly, to enable a visual pun about corpses ‘corpsing’ to be piled on top of the one about ‘corps de ballet’.

Harrison’s production (he also directs) shifts tack so frequently that there’s little support for the arguments he wants to make. This is a rainbow coalition of a piece, where luvvie cosiness, bitter political anger, stilted historical biographies and stage spectacle fail to create a vessel for drama or meaning.