Theatre: Tom Crean has his say
Colin Murphy on Aidan Dooley's one-man show, Tom Crean: Antarctic Explorer
Waves crash against the walls of the Olympia. An oil lamp swings as its bearer makes his way to the edge of the stage. He holds the lamp aloft and peers out into the gloom. And then – perhaps it's the size of the audience – he beams. From that moment, Tom Crean has us.
This is no ordinary performance by Aidan Dooley as the Irish Antarctic explorer, but yet it is a quintessentially ordinary performance. An ordinary man tells an extraordinary tale. The form is as old as the fireside. Aidan Dooley's moment of genius is to realise and exploit the power of that form, in what he describes as a “seanchaí” performance. Though there is plenty of method to his creation of Tom Crean's character, and craft to his script, the effect is to present a simple man telling his own story, as fluently and as haltingly as a simple man might tell it.
Tom Crean should be one of the great Irish heroes. But for the fact that they are recorded history, his feats would be scarcely more credible than those of the Fianna. A couple of books and a Guinness TV ad have restored to him some of the reputation he should have been afforded. But still, until this evening, I knew little of him beyond the Guinness ad – an Irish publican who somehow found himself in Antarctica. Now I have travelled in his footsteps. And what a journey.
Crean accompanied Captain Robert F Scott, and then Ernest Shackleton, on their pioneering Antarctic exploration expeditions. Scott reached the South Pole in 1912, but froze to death on the return. Crean survived, having turned back just short of the pole. The following year he joined Shackleton on his attempt to traverse Antarctica via the South Pole. Their ship got stuck in the ice, eventually cracking up. They set up camp on the ice for 10 months as the floe drifted north, then set off across the sea in their lifeboats to land on the uninhabited Elephant Island (with barely any food). Shackleton, Crean and four others set off again in one of the boats, crossing 800 miles of storm-ridden ocean to land on South Georgia Island. When they eventually dragged themselves into the island's whaling station and Shackleton introduced himself, the station's captain cried.
It took Shackleton three months to get back to rescue the men left on Elephant Island. As Tom Crean tells it, he was holding the telescope as they approached the island. Shackleton asked him, despairingly, how many men could he count at the camp. Crean counted, then counted again. Twenty two – the full crew, none dead. Lesser men than the whaling captain will cry when, after two hours spent in Tom Crean's magnetic company, they hear that.
Technically, the performance flags at moments, though this barely impacts upon its success. Aidan Dooley performs like a comedian, improvising around well-rehearsed anecdotes according to the response from his audience. This gives it a wonderfully human, spontaneous touch, but also occasionally means that he falters (almost imperceptibly). The second half, for some reason, seems rushed and less confident than the first. The epilogue, which sees Crean marrying and opening a pub, The South Pole, in Annascaul, Co Kerry – though because of the republican politics of the area he never feels comfortable talking of his achievements as an officer of the British Navy – seems an afterthought.
Yet as soon as he finishes, the audience rises to its feet. They are applauding Tom Crean as much as Aidan Dooley, perhaps, but Dooley's genius is to have let Tom Crean finally have his say.
Tom Crean: Antarctic Explorer
Olympia Theatre, Dublin
until 13 January