About the Play:

Finalist for the 1998 Governor General's Award for Drama (Canadian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize)

Inexpressible Island is a full-length drama by David Young. Based upon the true story of one of the greatest feats of human endurance of this century. In 1912 a Royal Navy scientific expedition was stranded in the Antarctic without supplies or shelter. Inexpressible Island is a story about human beings maintaining social order in the face of the wildest extremes of nature.

Inexpressible Island is about six men marooned in an ice cave in Antarctica in the early part of the 20th century. Stranded at the end of the world, at the end of the Heroic Age, three officers and three sailors – cut off from Captain Scott's ill-fated scientific expedition to the South Pole – burrow into a snow drift and for seven months sit out the coldest, most savage winter on record. They killed penguins and seals and stacked them up like cord wood. And they survived, against impossible odds, in the pitch black, howling hurricane that is an Antarctic winter. This play, based on these actual events, is an imagining of what actually happened inside that ice cave. Inexpressible Island is a survival saga that will help us survive our current predicament.

Inexpressible Island premiered in 1997 at Canadian Stage Theatre in Toronto and was subsequently produced in Canada, the United States, Germany, and London's West End under the title Antarctica.

Cast: 6 men

What people say:

"Young's hypnotic new play is one of the most ambitious, original and perplexing dramas ever written by a Canadian." — Maclean's

"A fine piece of theatre that throbs with intelligence and heart." — NOW Magazine

"Ranks as a major achievement … sears itself into the imagination." — Toronto Sun

About the Playwright:

David S. Young is a Canadian playwright, novelist, and screenwriter. He has written extensively for film and television, beginning with Jim Henson's Fraggle Rock. He is the author of seven plays, two novels and several screenplays and teleplays. Two of his plays, Inexpressible Island and Glenn, have been nominated for multiple Canadian drama awards.