Patricia Cornelius

Do Not Go Gentle, presented by the Sydney Theatre Company, is a marvel of a play, and this is a marvel of a production. Patricia Cornelius’s words, spoken by Scott of the Antarctic and his ragtag bunch of fellow travellers, are poetic, quixotic, trenchant, and potent. The liminal space offered by the ice and the snow of the setting takes the characters deep into their own psychic extremities. They become ruminative, playful, despairing, and libidinal as they encounter the limits of their physical and emotional capacities. They yearn for the ever-elusive South Pole, seeking to reach an end that promises liberation and obliteration.

A low circular wooden walkway. A large canvas sack hanging from the ceiling. One sickening second to realise someone may be inside that sack, before it plummets to the ground. This is how Patricia Cornelius’s new play, RUNT, directed by long-term collaborator Susie Dee and starring another long-term associate, Nicci Wilks, opens: a thudding coup de théâtre that immediately establishes the work as incitement, as agitprop, as uncompromising sucker punch.