A Hundred Words for Snow

Her Dad was a Geography teacher, but Rory (Eddie Pattison) thinks of him as an explorer – an Arctic explorer.  For Rory, that’s what he was, really.  They played explorers in the nearby woods.  Her bedtime stories were the lives – and deaths – of the famous Arctic explorers.  But now Dad is gone, killed in a car accident.  Rory is utterly bereft.  In her Dad’s study, filled with posters, maps and books about the Arctic, she finds her Dad’s notebooks and discovers that he had planned, in great, precise detail, to go to the North Pole.  Okay, maybe it was a dream, but…  Rory decides that she’ll go – and scatter Dad’s ashes there…

A Hundred Words for Snow is an eighty-minute acclaimed monologue by UK playwright and director Tatty Hennessy.  Don’t let that eighty-minute running time put you off.  It’s a wonderfully sustained performance, on a stage bare except for a two-person hiker’s tent.  Eddie Pattison, in white overalls and a beanie, tells Rory’s story – a story of her journey to the North Pole and it absolutely holds our attention.  Throughout Connor Ross’ sound design hints at danger - ice floes cracking and falling – and his ‘incidental’ music is mostly appropriate.  When it’s not, we notice.

Pattison never lets us forget that Rory is a very individual 15-year-old schoolgirl – naïve, prickly, shy, funny, hyper-critical, touching, a bit of a loner – her Dad was both mentor and best friend - an outsider at school, self-conscious about her body – and at odds with her mother. 

But she is determined and crazy brave – after all, she’s doing this for Dad.  She does keep interrupting her story to tell us about the Arctic and the explorers, some of whom died getting to the North Pole, and the Inuit – not ‘Eskimos’ – and snow, and her Dad.  We realise that her compulsion to tell us all this stuff is because it’s what her Dad told her, and telling us is, sort of, her way of being with him, keeping him alive.

And, crazy and dangerous as it is for a 15-year-old schoolgirl to go to the North Pole, alone, via Norway, we care for her, and we want to know what happens next: can she do it?  Each step of the way, put before us in vivid but economic detail, increases the tension.  Apart from the diversions about the explorers, and the absolute shock of the cold, Rory’s journey includes unexpected adventures along the way, like the oh-so-cool Norwegian kids with whom she gets very drunk.  Her first sexual experience, described in the most funny but matter-of-fact way, leading to the realisation that she is a woman too, like millions and millions of women, left staring at the ceiling afterwards.  A step in coming of age. There is the brusque but kind older woman, a scientist and amateur painter, who invites Rory to go with her – ever closer to pole…

Rory’s journey takes her to far more than the North Pole.  The play’s very last line is an abrupt end to the journey, but it reveals such growth, acceptance, and maturity that Rory is revealed as so much more than a crazy autodictat schoolgirl.  

Eddie Pattison is a highly talented performer who can hold an audience in the palm of their hand – as we already knew from the award-winning cabaret Baby Bi Bi Bii – a show very different from this.  But do see this one.

By the way, according to Dad, the Inuit – not ‘Eskimos’ – do not have a hundred words for snow.  It’s a myth.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Cameron Grant (Parenthesy)