Patricia Cornelius’s 2006 play, Do Not Go Gentle, which takes his title from Dylan Thomas’s poem, is a poetically powerful depiction of old age and dementia. Set in an aged care home, a group of residents imagine themselves taking part in Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed 1911 expedition to the South Pole. In an inspired leap, Cornelius uses entries from Scott’s diary as a map into the forbidding territory of dementia and our own mortality. Heather Fairbairn directs a top-notch cast including Andrew Buchanan, Jennifer Flowers, Steven Grives, Christen O’Leary, Bruce Spence and William Zappa.

Limelight Editor’s Choice

In November 1911 Captain Robert Falcon Scott — navy officer, adventurer, explorer — led an intrepid, and ultimately doomed, race to the South Pole. In this searing masterpiece by Patricia Cornelius, winner of both the NSW and Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, the icy expanse of Antarctica becomes a haunting metaphor for old age — vast, majestic, unknowable, and unyielding.

A group of aged care residents imagine themselves as members of Scott’s ill-fated Antarctic expedition — battered by snow, blinded by wind, and trudging through a landscape as unforgiving as memory itself. But this isn’t just a journey to the South Pole, it’s a lyrical, unflinching exploration of ageing, the resilience of the human spirit and the extraordinary capacity for love to light the way back to ourselves.

Expertly crafted by one of Australia’s finest writers, Do Not Go Gentle inhabits two poetic worlds: one of epic adventure and another of quiet valediction.