As such, the play invites sustained meditation on consciousness, imagination, embodiment, and decay. This beautiful production does more than justice to the integrity and creativity of Cornelius’s vision. The performances are uniformly excellent, with each actor offering a sense of both the ordinariness and the ambition of their character, often at the same time. Our explorers are quotidian creatures, sustained by heroic fantasies of the self, but also reckoning with finitude and loss. Philip Quast’s Scott is a burly bear of a man, lovably delusional but still charismatic. Scott does not sing, and so we are deprived of one part of Quast’s repertoire, but his sonorous speaking voice offers some compensation and magnifies our sense of his character’s somewhat grandiloquent leadership.

Vanessa Downing plays Wilson with an impish stoicism, an odd combination, but she pulls it off to delightful and hilarious effect. The character of Bowers manages her memory loss with gruff disdain, but Brigid Zengeni enables us to access the grief behind her character’s seeming hardness.

Josh McConville easily carries off two roles. In one, he offers a guttural performance of a wild boy who haunts his father’s soul; in the other he mournfully plays Bowers’ husband, who is forced to reckon with his wife’s failure to remember him and the life they share.

Legendary Australian soprano Marilyn Richardson plays Maria, a Serbian woman who has found herself on ice in an Australian nursing home. Her venerable glamour, resonant pipes, and mordant humour contrast beautifully with the ice-bitten hypothermic messiness of Scott’s team.

John Gaden, Brigid Zengeni, Philip Quast, Vanessa Downing, and Peter Carroll in Sydney Theatre Company’s Do Not Go Gentle, 2023 (Prudence Upton)

Finally, a special mention of the extraordinary performances of John Gaden and Peter Carroll, both octogenarians and each performing in his sixtieth play for the STC. As Oates and Evans respectively, these actors offer us an intimate accounting of their frailty, while reminding us of their extraordinary mastery of the stage. Individually, each performance was wonderful. As a collective, they took us into the alchemy afforded by genuine teamwork in a way perhaps the real Scott could only have imagined.

The stage design by Charles Davis is clever without any hint of gimmickry. At various moments, the characters assemble upright in their sleeping bags, with only their heads poking out. This particular piece of staging, to my mind, evoked Beckett’s Happy Days, but it also reminded me of the Muppets, as the actors resembled nothing so much as soft puppets in those scenes. Throughout the production we have myriad moments of this type of playfulness, which leaven its serious themes with delight and wonder. The director Paige Rattray has clearly generated a space in which the creatives are made safe enough to take all sorts of vulnerable risks, without ever losing the throughline of the play’s integrity. Bruce Spence, another mainstay of Australian theatre, serves as the assistant director to Rattray. We have no way of knowing how Rattray and Spence divided their labour, but the flawlessness of this production suggests a meaningful collaboration.

Set on the ice, but never chilly, Do Not Go Gentle offers a profoundly moving experience to the audience. Our aged protagonists, in spite of their tremulous grasp on reality, are fully present as messy subjects slipping in the snow and broadening their horizons. I have rarely seen theatre that is so very clever and so very humane at the same time.

Do Not Go Gentle continues at the Roslyn Packer Theatre until 17 June 2023. Performance attended: 29 May.