LIMERICK Regeneration Agency is taking cultural responsibilities seriously with the backing of ‘Tom Crean Antarctic Explorer’ in Moyross Corpus Christ School next week. On Tuesday November 8, Aidan Dooley’s multi award winning show will entertain the community for a sneeze at €5 each. ‘Tom Crean Antarctic Explorer’ is the one-man show created by Dooley that tells in words, semaphore and imagination the epic, lifesaving sacrifice made by Crean, an Annascaul man, in Scott’s Antarctic trip.
From the Belltable to Boston, from Adelaide to New York and Edinburgh, this gem of a drama has won love, admiration, accolades and audiences.
The keening, rowing, dragging dramatics of Dooley in his boat as he lives out Crean’s perishing polar expedition is almighty. ‘Tom Crean’ won Best One Man Show in New York, took the Edinburgh Fringe 1st in 2006 and has been nominated from here to eternity for brilliance.
‘Tom Crean Antarctic Explorer’ comes to Moyross courtesy of Richard Ryan Promotions, the man who brought in ‘Happy Days’, ‘Little Gem’, ‘Dear Frankie’ and the GAA mad ‘Bondi Beach’.
“Someone did a count recently and come up with 650 performances so far of ‘Tom Crean’,” Aidan Dooley tells Limerick Post between gigs in Britain. “It’s an organic thing. I take it as a storyteller, the play changes all the time. I went to the Antarctic last year and that impacted on different bits of it. I’m open to the changes as other wise you would go off your head”.
Tom Crean surely did in the wilderness of numb. The playwright speaks of Crean, who was awarded the Albert Medal for bravery, as “a lovely man, very humble, not one to go shouting it from the tree tops”.
It was Michael Smith’s compulsive read on the Annascaul hero that fired up what was a school’s show by Dooley into 4-D bravura that speaks to every age group. Absorb one of the greatest Irish stories ever on Tuesday 8, 7.30pm, Corpus Christi School.
