Like all good Edwardian gentleman-officers, Campbell keeps up the spirits of his men with 'improving' educational activities (being products of Matthew Arnold's Victorian system of moral improvement via fine literature, they all know Keats et al) and hearty, bonding, 'middle-England' Church of England hymns. There are around four of these excellently-arranged songs in the play, where Vibert and Boxer typically take the harmony: the cast sing well together and the memory will float around your head for days afterwards. The seeds of social rivalry are sown during one of these songs, when Campbell patronisingly insists that the 'men' enunciate "Pilgrim" properly, instead of singing "Pilgrum".

The play ends with the actors taking their place in a time-frozen photograph, into which the aged Priestley retakes his place. Each cast member assumes a position reminiscent of the 'evolution of mankind' stages (Campbell crawls, Levick squats, Priestley walks, Dickason strides, Abbott carries the injured Browning): they are striding into base camp,  rejoining 'real time', and the frozen image is accompanied by the crackling roar of fire.

I saw the excellently-received, superbly acted, Alan Rickman/Lindsay Duncan revival of Private Lives in the same week. The audience laughed like drains and went home having merely enjoyed themselves. The Antarctica audience left somewhat shell-shocked from the emotion, in animated discussion, and full of praise for the actors and the "bravery" of the play. Pieces of Antarctica will continue to float around my brain for a long time: there is a lot to admire, a lot to think about. 

n.2 On the other hand...however, brilliant the acting is, however ambitious the scope of Young's writing (though there are some clunky lines which are masked by Vibert's delivery: modern audiences are too cynical for "remember the minnows"), however adventurous the direction, Antarctica is probably just too experimental for the West End, where audiences generally want to be able to switch off their brains and be entertained -- even 'serious' plays tend to have a straight narrative path. 
If it had simply been a Boy's Own 'battle against the odds', it probably would have been better critically received, but the pervading themes of time and history, coupled with the 'mental slippage' time-travelling structure, mean that the audience has a certain amount of decoding to do, which isn't expected in such a venue. 
     In the reviews, there was also a certain amount of snobbery at the Canadian writer's perception of Edwardian speech patterns and attitudes. However, Edwardian and Victorian explorers were notoriously bluff and gung-ho in their own ways, with a dry, understated humour which is expertly caught in much of the play (the audience certainly found these moments, even if the critics failed to see them as deliberate: see the Vibert Antarctica interview and David Young's own comments on the intentional humour). There is no doubt that Oates' parting line to Scott that he was "just going outside and may be gone some time" is also something that modern critics would never have found believable if they had not heard it before.