"A profound exploration of ageing and dementia..."
★★★★★
The Guardian

The year is 1912 and English explorer and renaissance man Robert Falcon Scott is leading a group of intrepid adventurers to make history: they plan to be the first people ever to reach the South Pole. Up towering glaciers, through blinding blizzards, skirting bottomless crevasses, they march on, racing against Amundsen and his team – a competing expedition from Norway – to plant a flag and gain the glory of claiming the final frontier.

But another story lies beneath the icy tundra – a story of ordinary people facing a frontier that is just as immense: their own mortality. 

As the play unfolds, it is revealed that the explorers are in fact patients living at an aged care facility in suburban Australia, grappling with the realities of their ailing bodies and fading memories, whilst slipping in and out of a vivid Antarctic daydream. 

Through a series of moving vignettes that shift seamlessly between realism and fantasy, each character must confront the unfinished business that haunts their dreams; from grief, dementia, and trauma, to lost children and first loves.

As each narrative thread inches closer toward its natural end, a beautiful tapestry of life, death and the perilous passage in between begins to emerge in this glorious fantasia that asks what it means to have lived well. 

Do Not Go Gentle is on stage now, at Roslyn Packer Theatre, until 17 June 2023.