Do Not Go Gentle was written in 2006 and has won several notable Australian playwriting awards. The work is titled after Dylan Thomas’ poem Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, an appeal for a dying father to face his mortality with defiance rather than acceptance. A recitation from the poem is an inevitable part of the script.

Directed by Heather Fairbairn, with assistant director Kate Wilson, it draws parallels between the featureless, shifting physical landscape of Antarctica and the interior landscape of a mind and memory affected by ageing and dementia.

Queensland Theatre Company’s Do Not Go Gentle. Photo © Stephen Henry

The central character considers himself to be Captain Robert Falcon Scott, leader of the 1911 expedition to the South Pole, of which there were no survivors.

But this Scott is not an explorer; he is a man in an aged care facility, dreaming himself and his fellow residents into an age of heroes. In the isolation of the facility and their fraying memories, the others are warmed by indignation, dogged by grief, or cheerfully embracing the next stage of life and reflecting with satisfaction on their lives.

At its...