Fram

Reliance on devices like the photograph and slide will lead, I rather fear, to linguistic suicide. We must keep on challenging language to engage with all we suffer from in this new modern age. This epic sweep of a play takes us from a contemporary Westminster Abbey to the Arctic ship Fram - or Forward - specially built by the famous Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen who, with his suicidal companion, Johansen, makes a bid on foot for the North Pole in the 1890s. Though incompatible, they share a bear fur sleeping-bag through the long winter. Nansen, still haunted by Johansen's ghost is appointed to the League of Nations. As a figurehead of Russian famine relief in 1922, he conducts the first celebrity campaign, searching for means, however shocking, to make people care. Tony Harrison's major new work for the theatre, Fram, premiered at the National Theatre in April 2007.

Tony Harrison was born in Leeds in 1937. His volumes of poetry include The Loiners (winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize), Continuous, v. (broadcast on Channel 4 in 1987, winning the Royal Television Society Award), The Gaze of the Gorgon (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Poetry) and Laureate's Block. Recognised as Britain's leading theatre and film poet, Tony Harrison has written extensively for the National Theatre, the New York Metropolitan Opera, the BBC, Channel 4, the RSC, and for unique ancient spaces in Greece, Austria and Japan. His films include Black Daisies for the Bride, whichwon the Prix Italia in 1994, The Shadow of Hiroshima, Prometheus and Crossings. Five volumes of plays and his Collected Film Poetry are published by Faber and his Collected Poems by Penguin. His play, Fram, premiered at the National Theatre in 2008. Tony Harrison was awarded the PEN/Pinter Prize 2009, the European Prize for Literature 2010, the David Cohen Prize for Literature 2015, and the Premio Feronia 2016 in Rome, in special recognition of a foreign author.