Fiction grows on fact the way mushrooms grow on a rotting log. This is the story of how one
particular mushroom farm, my play Antarctica, found its way into the world. 
    The play is a work of fiction inspired by events that took place in 1912 on the verge of the frozen continent. While Captain Scott was dying in his tent, a scientific party attached to his  expedition was finishing a geological survey in another region. After three months of summer
sledging, their supplies were down to a nub as they waited on a desolate stretch of Antarctic shore for the ship Terra Nova, which would return them to the expeditionary hut at Cape Evans. 
    But ice conditions kept it away, and winter was roaring in. In the shrinking hours of daylight, katabatic winds blowing downhill tore their tent to ribbons. With no winter garments or provisions, the party knew they were facing certain death. So they did what the best kind of Englishmen do in such a situation: they dug a hole in the snow, killed seals and penguins and stacked them up like cordwood, and lived underground in a pitch-black hellhole for seven months. They endured one of the most savage Antarctic winters on record, without so much as a change of clothes. The living conditions they underwent were beyond description, so they named the place where they were marooned InexpressibleIsland. 
    At the end of their confinement, the team walked 250 miles to safety, and when they arrived back at Cape Evans, no one recognised them. In the months that followed, their survival saga was eclipsed by Scott's very public tragedy at the south pole. They returned to Britain and slipped away from public view. Their story receives only passing mention in Antarctic literature, and today they are largely forgotten. Those are the bare bones of their story. 
    Ten years ago, I was on a 100-mile wilderness trudge in the Yukon with a couple of English friends. High in the mountains we were hit by a freak storm. It was the end of August and we weren't properly equipped for winter travel, so we hunkered down in our tiny tent for three days while the storm blew itself out. 
    In such conditions, one falls into a kind of mental torpor, drifting in the interzone between wakefulness and sleep. I was reminded of an extended hospital stay that defined my childhood and has become, in the flawed glass of hindsight, a kind of golden age. I was out of school for nearly two years, worried adults gathering close to shower me with attention. I watched a boy in the opposite bed go blind an inch at a time. The questions I was born to ask are all rooted in that period of confinement. 

Dr Levick was the second in command, nicknamed Mother by the men because he was a compassionate  soul who made friends across social boundaries. His nickname was a huge clue. I realised I was writing a play about a family, and that Levick, custodian of civilisation, was the matriarch. Campbell, custodian of ritual and authority, was the father. It was a Victorian family, the one that is still with us. 
     In my invention of Levick, I drew heavily on Dr Wilson, who died with Scott and Apsley Cherry-Garrard, another member of the same expedition. I wanted to build a character who had a panoramic understanding of world civilisation, a humanist who  kept large chunks of himself hidden from view. So I combined aspects of Levick, Wilson and Cherry-Garrard, in a family that was the Royal Navy in the last days of empire. The enlisted men  were obviously the children. I was off to the races. 

Next up was Raymond Priestly, the outsider, a civilian geologist who was officer class but not Royal Navy. After the expedition, Priestly went on to a distinguished career at Cambridge, where he founded the Scott Polar Research Institute and lived in quiet fame as a gentleman scholar and raconteur. Here, he became the chronicler, the man formed by his experiences in the cave and left with unanswered questions that occupied the rest of his life. In his journal, remembering the hurricane howling over the  roof of the cave, he wrote: "The happiest days of my life." These became the first words in the play. The wind itself became an invisible character driving the dramatic action. 

Dickason was the most stalwart of the three children in the family I was inventing, and his nickname was Dog. Many of Dog's journal entries began with two words: "Cold, windy." I saw a man who lived largely in silence, solid as oak. I transformed  him into Campbell's batman, imagining that he followed his master from command to command and knew all the family secrets. Dickason would be the trusted son. 

Next in line was Browning, the family weakling. In the journals, everyone worried about Browning's health. He troubled the group with his nightmares and delusional premonitions. And in the play, he became the emblem of their common suffering, and also a kind of oracle. He would be my window into the psychological strangeness of this savage place, where the boundary between the conscious and unconscious mind disappeared. I gave him a terrible secret: the big toe on his left foot has gone black. He's afraid to tell anyone. Browning was the easiest voice for me. He carries all my childhood fears. 

Finally, there was Abbott, a strong, brooding presence in the expedition photographs. Others described him as the hardest man in the party. He was the best hunter, the man you sent out to find a seal when it was blowing a pitch-black hurricane. At some point in that horrendous winter, he gave himself a terrible cut, severing the tendons in one finger. (On the way home, he had a nervous breakdown aboard ship and had to be institutionalised.) I tapped into Abbott's killer instinct and ratcheted it up to a boil. He would be the bad seed, the  dangerous son who would drive the action in the cave and save the family by threatening to destroy it. 

Early on, this play told me it wanted to be about the mind.  These men were inventing mental games to defy the wildest extremes of nature. In the larger frame, it's 1912, the year in which Virginia Woolf said that human consciousness changed. In Dublin, Joyce was reinventing prose. In Paris, Picasso was in his blue period. Freud was reading his tea leaves in Vienna, and Einstein was working late in the Zurich patent office. The shadow of the first world war was looming just over the horizon. The snow cave would be a skull, a crucible, a lens. The men who emerged from the horrors of that winter at Inexpressible Island would be the first true citizens of the new century. And so, my crop of mushrooms began to grow...