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eye WEEKLY                                             October 27 1994
Toronto's arts newspaper                      .....free every Thursday
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ONSTAGE                                                        ONSTAGE

                     CONQUEST OF THE SOUTH POLE

        Featuring David Jansen, Kevin Bundy, Duncan Ollerenshaw
                           and Tamara Bick. 
 Written by Manfred Karge. Translated by Tinch Minter & Anthony Vivis.
                   Directed by Josephine Le Grice.
  Tarragon Extra Space, 30 Bridgman Ave. To Nov 6. $12-$16, 531-1827.

                                  by
                           ROBERT ARMSTRONG


When I was 16, I looked after a 20-year-old man with severe cerebral
palsy. He couldn't speak, couldn't even move. Every night, I wondered
what he was thinking. Tried to imagine 20 years of full awareness,
without uttering a single thought. What can that be like?

Conquest Of The South Pole doesn't answer this question and perhaps
isn't meant to. Except that the show's final image is of a man
incoherent because of cerebral palsy, huddled under a blanket, staring
out at the audience. Playwright Manfred Karge must have wanted to
create the same uneasiness that I once felt.

This didn't happen. Which is unfortunate, because if this production
could grab on to some of Karge's acidic pessimism, it would be truly
brilliant. Instead ... it's still one of the best shows in town.

Four terminally unemployed men, one on the edge of suicide, recover
purpose in life through a simple fiction: the re-creation of Roald
Amundsen's 1911 trek to the South Pole. Of course, the guys don't
actually go to Antarctica. Instead, they play- act in the attic of a
house -- a laundry-filled space with room for their imaginations. Which
leads to the surreal (and hysterically funny) sight of grown men diving
through a pair of jockey shorts as they make-believe they're falling
into an ice crevasse.

David Jansen, the loquacious Slupianek, is simply one of the best
actors in the city. And right behind him stand Kevin Bundy as the
timid, blank-faced Braukmann, and Duncan Ollerenshaw as the slouching,
unstable Seiffert. I was also impressed by Tamara Bick, playing the
brash and overbearing Frau Braukmann, and by Ron Kennell's convincingly
palsied Frankieboy.

Backing them up was Josephine Le Grice's direction, which reached
wonderfully inventive heights in the staging (audiencing?) of the
robbery of an outdoor equipment store. If Le Grice did choose to avoid
some of the nastier points in the script, that's still not a reason to
prevent you from seeing it.


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