Layered, complex and as beautiful as the snowfall, Hennessy’s play is an epic Arctic adventure about adolescence, grief, love, and about being an explorer in a melting world. A Hundred Words for Snow at Trafalgar Studios is written by Tatty Hennessy, directed by Lucy Jane Atkinson and performed by Gemma Barnett.

A Hundred Words For Snow - Official London Theatre

With a plastic compass and Dad’s ashes at her side, Rory sets off in the footsteps of all the dead beardy explorers before her, to get Dad to the North Pole. While, understandably, it doesn’t actually contain one hundred different words for snow, it does offer the audience a charming, well-produced emotive piece that manages to be lighthearted while also dealing with a number of significant life-changing issues. Because the notebook wouldn’t have existed without the history and the history wouldn’t have happened without the geography and none of it would’ve happened at all if all the skin of the world hadn’t cooled and settled the way that it did and the oceans hadn’t flowed the way that they do and the ice didn’t freeze the way that it does, if the earth hadn’t stopped exactly this far from the sun, if the sun never formed then I, Rory, me, here, hello, would never have been sitting watching my mum cry in a helicopter in a snowstorm with my dad’s ashes at the North Pole. The coffin like, slides behind these red curtains, and all I could think about was how many other people must’ve been burned in there and how unless they’re really good at sweeping there’s probably little bits of other people still in there with him and I wondered who they were and what their family thought about when the curtain shut.Even on a small stage, we can feel the production breathe and take up space far beyond the confines of the performance space. Languages in the Inuit and Yupik language groups add suffixes to words to express the same concepts expressed in English and many other languages by means of compound words, phrases, and even entire sentences. These three stems are found in all Inuit languages and dialects—except for West Greenlandic, which lacks * aniɣu. A Hundred Words for Snow debuted at the Arcola Theatre in 2018, winning the VAULT Origins Award for outstanding new work, before transferring to the Trafalgar Studios in the West End. The only other person on stage, apart from the urn full of ashes, is cellist Stephanie Cummins, who tackles Nicholas Skilbeck’s beautiful compositions with grace and determination.

A Hundred Words for Snow - Audition Scenes A Hundred Words for Snow - Audition Scenes

In other words, English speakers living in Alaska, for example, have no trouble describing as many different kinds of snow as Inuit speakers.

Yet although the premise of her mission doesn’t feel right, being more of a fantasy than a real event, Hennessy does inject the story with some realistic detail. When the geography teacher father of Rory—short for Aurora—dies in a car crash, she takes a look at his papers in his desk at home and discovers that his passion for North Pole explorers included a plan to go to the Arctic. The essential morphological question is why a language would say, for example, "lake", "river", and "brook" instead of something like "waterplace", "waterfast", and "waterslow".