View from the Green Room: Crean’s frozen odyssey
Aidan Dooley as Tom Crean Antartic Explorer.
This was two hours of riveting theatre. On a bare set, overhung by a frozen full moon, with winds howling around Theatre Royal, Aidan Dooley enters with a single storm lamp to tell his epic story. Tom Crean, a Kerryman of epic stature with a gift for storytelling, never kept a diary to perpetuate his frozen odyssey; he was too busy surviving - and saving others.
And this story is fascinating - a tale packed with courage, image-painted detail, pulsating emotion and remarkable loyalty…"I’ll not hear a word agin’ Captain Scott"…"Shackleton was a born leader and a gentleman". Crean never questioned the folly of their decisions - or why others succeeded and they failed.
It’s the detail that sucks you in. "It can get as low as minus 90 degrees Centigrade"…"the crevices could be four miles deep"..."Don’t shweat," he warns, "it freezes inside ur vesht" or "five minutes without ur gloves and u lose ur fingers".
Aidan Dooley makes great use of his hands when describing his three journeys…"one, two three", he counts them out on his fingers… "to the South Pole… Chrisht! One would be enough for any man…was I maaaad?"
The actor is endlessly resourceful in using props, limbs and gestures to carry us along his journey. The purpose of every item of his clothing is explained and the sources of his food recalled…albatrosses, seals and the dogs that caused constant diarrhoea. Crean’s penguins don’t come in wrappers. The fear of sleeping on a drifting ice flow now melted to two feet in thickness with killer whales waiting silently below, watching them through the ice… always watchin’ us, thinking we were seals, ye know…you wouldn’t get much shleep then, do u know now"…was dramatically recalled. "Was I maaaad?"
It was drama throughout. Trekking across 40 miles of frozen wasteland on his own in 20 hours on Scott’s calamitous expedition in 1912 - without a compass - to rescue two others was recalled, as was another epic 800-mile journey with Shackleton in 1914…"who was no sailor, ye know"… in a flimsy boat that tacked into 80 foot waves in a hurricane to rescue 22 others.
Sailing through hurricanes; tobogganing down frozen cliffs on his backside into cloudy mists that could have concealed 400-feet-deep crevices; the cracking of the boards of Shackleton’s ship ‘Endeavour’ that became trapped in the ice before finally breaking up; eating when told and not when hungry; the excruciating pain of snow-blindness, are all part of the narrative that tumbles from Dooley in his off-the-cuff style, with a deadly accurate Kerry rhythm, that captivates, engrosses and informs his audience. "Was I maaad?"
Dooley invests Crean with enormous wit and energy and a wisdom born of epic experience. He is never bitter and brutally honest…"I cried, d’ye know when Captain Scott told me that I wouldn’t be one of the four to travel the final leg of the journey to the South Pole"…the hot shcalding shteam pouring from his eyes in the frozen climate, his eyes "lit up like torch fire".
Wasn’t he lucky? Be careful what you wish for.
Others on the journey kept diaries and made money from them; Crean was "too busy doin’ other things" - like surviving. Scott’s parents gave him some money - which he used to purchase a pub aptly called ‘The South Pole Inn’ in his village of Annascaul - because of his kindness to the explorer in arranging his frozen funeral.
Crean was always the man to do the right thing - even if his fellow countrymen, in the new post-colonial Republic, were reluctant to honour a second-class petty officer in the Royal Navy, an accidental hero who had enlisted at the age of 15 to ‘best’ his father.
His brother Cornelius, an RIC policeman, was murdered by Republicans in Ballinspittle, once the home of dancing Madonna-statues on pedestals back in the eighties.
Tom lived a quiet and anonymous post-Antarctic life in Kerry, put away all his medals and never gave interviews; most probably because he deemed it unwise to speak of his polar exploits as a sailor in the Royal Navy in a county steeped in bloody republicanism.
He died of peritonitis at the age of 61 in July 1938 in the Bons Secours Hospital in Cork as a result of a burst appendix. A delay caused by the absence of a surgeon in Tralee General Hospital was the crucial factor in the death of a mountain of a man who braved hurricanes and frozen wastes to save so many others.
Sadly, Aidan Dooley’s magnificent performance was interrupted three times by mobile phones.
Crean is commemorated in at least two place names: Mount Crean at 8,630 feet in Victoria Land and the Crean Glacier on South Georgia in the Antarctic. This one-man play, which has been widely performed since 2001 by its author Aidan Dooley, had a special showing at the South Pole Inn, Annascaul, in October 2001. Present were Crean's daughters, Eileen and Mary, both in their 80s. Apparently he never told them his stories; according to Eileen… "He put his medals and his sword in a box ... and that was that. He was a very humble man."
Gods know their own importance.
