Output details

Erebus: a 45-minute long radio verse play for BBC radio 4 based on Sir John Franklin's disastrous expedition to find the Arctic North West Passage

Erebus is a forty-five minute radio poetry play broadcast in the Radio Four Afternoon Play slot in January 2012. It was played for an audience at the Scott Polar Museum in Cambridge in March 2013, followed by a question and answer session with the author, producer and sound designer. The broad story of the play is John Franklin’s disastrous expedition to discover the North West passage in the mid-1800s. But the research which drove the process of writing it concentrates on how the story might be told in a non-narrative way, focusing on the characters’ thoughts and motivations, and how poetry might be used to illuminate their inner lives more vividly than a prose telling. The characters are used to represent different political and cultural positions: a key factor in the failure of the expedition was the arrogant refusal of the British to learn from Inuit adaptation to the hostile environment of the arctic, for example. The Inuit character and his knowledge of the expedition’s fate, becomes important in the play. Jane Franklin’s perspective on her husband and his expedition is important in this regard, too. To heighten the multi-vocal effect, John Franklin himself has no voice in the play: the thoughts and opinions of others spin around him, lyrical almost to the point of song, even about harsh realities.