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David Young Inexpressible Island. Scirocco $14.95
Robin McGrath Escaped Domestics. Killick $12.95
It would have made sense for the awardwinning author of Glenn to go north for his next play. In fine Gouldian fashion, David Young's Inexpressible Island does pursue the themes of temporal disjunction and existential isolation in a wintry expanse. However, Young's idea is to go south, not north, with the scientific party attached to Captain Scott's ill-fated British expedition to the South Pole. Inexpressible Island revives the little-known story of six stranded researchers who survived an entire Antarctic winter by living on seal meat in a snow cave while Scott's party starved elsewhere on the continent. The tragic events of 1912 come to life through Young's skilled rendering of idiomatic English; the play is partly dedicated to Young's mother "Toto, the best of the English." However, Young's real focus is on "the clock of the soul;' not the historical expedition itself.
Young's drama is a memory play with a particularly acute interest in time. The narrator, Dr. Priestley, is a Cambridge geologist whose scholarly books on geologic time mask his fundamental incomprehension of human history and veil his secret desire to write a novel about the party's Antarctic experience. Priestley is joined in his reminiscences by Dickason-the only other surviving member of the party-at a memorial service for Dr. Levick, the expeditions medical officer. In the shadow of Levick's funeral during the Blitzkrieg, the pair confront oblivion: "Not a mention of our overwintering in the Times obituary," Priestley muses....