"We'll be forgotten," one of the characters tells a fellow survivor in David Young's play, Antarctica. "It's Captain Scott they'll want to remember." Certainly, the fate of Scott - icon of the
English love of a gentlemanly good loser - long eclipsed the miraculous feats of endurance pulled off by the Anglo-Irish Shackleton, who managed to get all his men back from a disastrous 1914 expedition and rightly claimed: "Not a life lost, and we have been through hell." On an earlier failed trek, Shackleton - soon to played by Russell Crowe in a Hollywood movie, and by Kenneth Branagh in a Channel 4 series - had put his men's safety before his own bid for glory, telling his wife, "Better a live donkey than a dead lion."

That sentiment crops up verbatim in Antarctica - which is advertised as "a work of fiction inspired by actual events". The play focuses on the quite distinct survival story of six men who,
in April 1912, found themselves stranded on the unforgiving continent with no winter clothing, only a few weeks' rations and six months to wait before the return of spring.

In Young's play, though, the line is given not to the commander of the outfit (an edgily rigid, Ripping Yarns-style Mark Bazeley), but to its bolshiest member, Abbott (Darrell d'Silva). It would be pedantic to remark on this reassignment, if it didn't intensify a sense that there's something conveniently cobbled together about the play's microcosm of Englishness. With its built-in existential extremities and its opportunities for claustrophobic class conflict, a polar dug-out in 1912 might seem like a dream situation for a playwright, but Antarctica demonstrates that the terrain is also full of dramaturgical traps.

The Boy's Own-story aspect of the piece, and of Richard Rose's strongly cast and vividly acted ensemble production, can't help but grip. The elaborate management of the scanty rations (working out the precise number of precious muscatel raisins that can be consumed on the last day of each month) and the shakier management of bodily functions (there's
involuntary urination caused by the diet of seal blubber) exert a fascination equal to the attempted management of the men (an "invisible curtain" is invented that supposedly allows leaders and led to talk freely about each other on either side). And Rae Smith's spare, haunting set communicates both the epic emptiness of the outer world and the stifling atmosphere of the living quarters, as its huge pane of rippled ice rears up and clamps down.

Young, though, rarely allows the story to speak for itself. True, a predicament like this might turn the most prosaic of men into a symbolist poet. But the play's characters would be more moving if they occasionally found their feelings less easily expressible. Excellent acting from, say, Ronan Vibert as the likeably hands-on doctor sometimes distracts you from the declamatory, diligently point-making nature of the dialogue.

But the construction is awkward and puzzling, with a framing device that has Stephen Boxer's Cambridge geologist and Eddie Marsan's confused little Dickason looking back at the ordeal from an ill-defined future perspective. The mutinous Abbott had anticipated "a great cleansing of the system" and blood in the streets. But it was a bloodbath of a different kind,  the First World War, which was soon to slaughter a generation. Odd, in a play examining the vices and virtues of the old heroic ethos, that that cataclysm goes unmentioned in the
retrospective musings.

Polar exploration is normally the stuff of movies rather than of theatre. But David Young's Canadian play does a commendable job in telling the story of six men cut off from Captain Scott's expedition to the south pole in 1912 and marooned on Inexpressible island: what
is harder to fathom is the metaphorical meaning Young wishes us to draw.
The Antarctic experience is filtered through the memory of Priestley, an academic geologist and the only non-naval member of the party; and what emerges, apart from the obvious hardship, is the mixture of camaraderie and conflict. The men are trapped for months in severest
winter with only seven weeks  of rations. But Lieutenant Campbell, the leader, preaches order, discipline, hymn singing and lectures to see them through. He is backed by Priestley and a gentleman-doctor, Levick. Campbell's antagonist amongst the three ratings, however, is a bolshy tyke called Abbott who unavailingly tries to lead an insurrection.

Young clearly declares the play to be fiction inspired by real events: even so it would be helpful to have more background information about the group's relationship to Scott's ill-fated party. It is also not entirely clear whether the play is a parable about class or survival. You could, in one way, see it as a belated tribute to the officer class in that the Plato-quoting  Campbell's methods ultimately see the men through. But contradicting that is the fact that
the rational Darwinian doctor is the one who comes closest to cracking up.

I am not asking for messages or resolutions: simply a clearer indication of what drew Young to a lesser known episode in polar exploration. But, even if the larger meaning is elusive, the play offers a detailed account of heroic survival under pressure.
Above all, it is about the rituals people devise to see them through in hardship. Sometimes the
rituals seem absurd such as the invisible wall that Campbell erects between the officers and men: at other times they seem highly practical as when the fast disappearing rations are divided into miniscule parts or when the nightly hymn singing is followed by the writing up of journals.
Even if in the end it seems an unfashionable tribute to public school virtues, it is atmospherically directed by Richard Rose and well acted by the cast of six: Mark Bazeley is all stoic stiff upper lippery as Campbell, Darrell D'Silva exudes feral ferocity as his working class rival and there is good support from Ronan Vibert as the flaky doctor and Stephen Boxer as the nervy geologist.Rae Smith's design also captures the hermetic isolation. 
For all its atmospheric power, however, the movies are better equipped than theatre to deal
with polar exploration.

A chill wind blows through the West End at the moment. But none chiller than at the Savoy, where we are suddenly stuck in a cold snap near the South Pole.
David Young's dogged play arrives from Canada with a top-notch cast of actors as a bunch of unknown explorers cut off from Captain Scott's fateful expedition in 1912.
Mark Bazeley is the team captain, Stephen Boxer the intellectual historian and Ronan Vibert -- a fine actor who resembles both Alan Rickman and Linus Roache -- is a sensitive foil to Darrell D'Silva and Jason Flemyng. The South Pole may well be the safest place on Earth at the moment, but this freezing flapdoodle left me feeling decidedly sub-zero.
Anyway, I prefer my Antarctic beautifully photographed, as in David Attenborough's The Blue Planet on BBC TV.
Six chaps in messy beards and ugly anoraks exert a limited appeal at the best of times.