AIDEN DOOLEY’S multi-award winning solo show, Tom Crean Antarctic Explorer, makes a welcome return to the Town Hall shortly for a six night run, from Monday January 26 to Saturday 31 at 8pm.
Tom Crean, Kerry native and intrepid Antarctic explorer, is vividly brought to life in Dooley’s dramatic and humorous solo performance as he relays the riveting stories of Crean’s three epic Polar voyages.
Crean was one of the few men to serve with both Scott and Shackleton and survive the three famous expeditions on the ships Discovery, (1901 - 1904 ); Terra Nova (1910 - 1913 ); and Endurance (1914 - 1916 ).
Scott's 1911-13 Terra Nova expedition saw the race to reach the South Pole lost to Norway’s Roald Amundsen and end in the deaths of Scott and his party. During this expedition Crean’s 35-mile solo walk across the Ross Ice Shelf to save the life of Edward Evans led to his receiving the Albert Medal.
Crean’s third Antarctic voyage was on Endurance led by Ernest Shackleton, in which he served as second officer. After the ship became beset in the pack ice and sank, Crean took part in a dramatic series of events including months spent drifting on the ice, a journey in lifeboats to Elephant Island, and an open boat journey of 800 nautical miles from there to South Georgia.
Upon reaching South Georgia, Crean was one of the party of three who undertook the first land crossing of the island, without maps or proper mountaineering equipment.
His contributions to these expeditions earned him three Polar medals, and a reputation as a tough and dependable polar traveller. When his naval career ended in 1920, Crean moved back to County Kerry. In his home town of Annascaul, he and his wife Ellen opened a pub called the South Pole Inn. He lived there quietly until his death in 1938.
Dooley’s involvement with Crean’s story first began eight years ago, when Greenwich Museum asked him to put together a short drama on polar exploration and, over the following year or so, that half-hour show grew into the two-hour full length drama that he has been touring ever since to huge acclaim.
Indeed, by now Dooley has probably racked up more miles than Tom Crean himself on his epic voyages. Dooley’s show has been to the US, Britain, Australia, Dubai, Malta, and a variety of far-flung British Council outposts.
“These days I do the show in bursts; I can resurrect it whenever there’s a demand,” he reveals over an afternoon phonecall. “So I always look forward to coming back to it. In the past few years it’s gone from playing 2/300-seater theatres to venues holding 1,300 like Dublin’s Olympia. And I love that those wonderful old Victorian theatres, like the Olympia, can still retain the show’s innate intimacy.”
Part of the reason for the show’s continuing popularity is that it seems to attract repeat viewings among its audiences, as Dooley explains.
“People who come to see it for the first time always enjoy the humour in the show and respond to its pathos also,” he says. “I’ve had people come to see it five or six times. I get a lot of mountaineering clubs and mariners and groups like that who seem to come and see it a second or third time.
“It’s never exactly the same from one run to the next, I’m always looking for little things to improve it or try something new; maybe add a snatch of a ballad, something like that. Those kind of things help keep it fresh.”
Dooley reveals that next year he’s hoping to emulate Crean and finally visit the Antarctic himself.
“In 2010 the Tom Crean Society are making a trip to the Antarctic and they’ve invited me along,” he says. “The huts where Tom and his crewmates from The Discovery stayed are still there exactly as the men left them, with blankets and jumpers, and so on, scattered about as if they had just left that morning. I’m really looking forward to that; being able to see the actual bunk where Tom stayed will be very moving for me I’m certain.”
Having got to know Crean so well over the past eight years, which personal qualities of the man does Dooley particularly admire?
“His perseverance in the face of adversity, his single-mindedness,” he says. “In those sort of extreme, life or death, situations you can’t countenance any negativity if want to survive and I think he had a positivity that was extraordinary. I hope the show succeeds in giving people a glimpse of that. We see what humanity can be; here was a man who risked his own life to save the lives of his comrades and his altruism was rewarded with success.”
For tickets to Tom Crean Antarctic Explorer contact the Town Hall Theatre on 091-569777.
