DRAMA
THE WHITE ROAD
The story of Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition is well known at Dulwich. To commemorate the centenary of this fateful event, the College commissioned a play to give new life to the tale. Below, two of the creative team behind The White Road , Peter Jolly and playwright Jenny Worton, reveal the origins of the production, while this year’s Director in Residence, George Chilcott, shares his reactions to its staging
Photographs by Nobby Clark and Maggie Jarman
‘What the ice gets, the ice keeps…’
When the opportunity arose to work on a new play with Jenny Worton, the Artistic Associate at the Almeida, it was too good an opportunity to miss. In the archive there is an abandoned script by the late Colin Welland, who told me the problem was that the story was too ‘black and white’ for film. In many respects this was right; it was important to find the colour. After many meetings, we discovered that a key decision was to integrate girls into what was, apparently, an all-male story; this meant uncovering Shackleton’s relationship with his sister and mother as well as the ‘lady’ Endurance. Suddenly the modern world and British Antarctic Survey’s Halley Base crashed into Jenny’s imagination and the colour was discovered. PJ
Right: Alex Holley (Year 13) as Ernest Shackleton
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