Towards The Summit

"We tell the tale of [Robert Falcon] Scott’s doomed expedition to the pole in 1910–1913, and [Ernest] Shackleton’s extraordinary feat of survival when his ship the Endurance was crushed by the ice of the Weddell sea a couple of years later,” says Sam Prebble, writer and member of Auckland-based alt-folk band Bond Street Bridge, who are presenting the show.

Awarded Best Music at its premiere in the 2013 NZ Fringe Festival, the show has played more than a hundred times in various venues – it even had an opening stint for Billy Bragg on his 2014 NZ tour. Part of its success is doubtless due to its uniqueness; as a band first, Bond Street Bridge tell the story as if it were a folk song.  “There’s no acting, but there’s a lot of drama. We’re also using a lot of heritage material – the original photos that Captain Scott and Ernest Shackleton’s teams took 100 years ago are incorporated into our multimedia show, and I used the diaries and letters as a direct basis for many of the songs. This means that the audience sees the heritage material reinterpreted and presented in a new way, which a lot of people find very moving.”

The idea for the show came to Prebble when he stumbled on a book of photographs from Scott’s latest expedition. Being the child of two mountaineers, and having grown up with stories of survival and courage in the wilderness, Prebble was immediately hooked by Scott’s photos, and the obsession began from there. He read everything he could on that period of history. “The incredible stories of survival and Edwardian pluck are so moving, and the way many of these explorers wrote in their diaries and letters is so lyrical, it felt inevitable that I would draw inspiration from the material.”

When creating a piece based on history, however, there’s bound to be challenges. Prebble felt the pressure to do justice to the legacy of the explorers. It all worked out, to say the least. “We’ve now had invitations to perform at most of the top museums in NZ and in a lot of heritage festivals as well, which has been a nice recognition of our respect for the material we’ve used.”