Meares' speech

Actors have been using this as a training/teaching monologue for a while. One was delighted to learn that Bill Nighy had delivered it; now he had a "how to do it" video for comparison--and how to fit four syllables into "New Zealand". Here it is:

(28.Int Meares's tent. Meares, in loose close shot over Wilson's left shoulder, bears a fresh pad of lint secured by a head bandage over his right eye. He sits for some moments cleaning his pipe stem. Mulling the question. Begins calm, hard, delivers considerable acid ferocity by the time he's done.)

MEARES: Let me be plain, Dr. Wilson. Gentlemen do not make public their grievances and disagreements, and I am bound by that code as much as any man; but I would not want my reasons to be willfully misconstrued particularly by my fellows on the trip. I came to this......expedition with decent credentials: years of experience in the world's wilds – Siberia, Manchuria, India, Africa, some skill in Russian, Chinese, Hindustani and a working knowledge of dogs and their habits. All these I offered for nothing, for a pittance because I believed in the show....

And while I believed in that show, I've been prepared to swallow my professional pride and follow the order of the day, however confused, stupid, inept or incompetent those orders may have been.

Well, the events of last season, and everything that's happened since persuade me that my belief in this particular enterprise is sadly misplaced. My record shows I am no coward, no weakling: but when my life is put at risk by leadership as crass, as arrogant and as....irresponsible as that which Captain Scott displays every day we are here. I know what I must do.

Ten years ago, when I was twenty, I drove a team of dogs across Siberia, a journey of two thousand miles. It taught me many things, but chiefly I learned the narrowness of the line Man walks in Nature between farce and tragedy. It is a lesson those Norwegians have learned on sea and ice and mountain time and time again. It's a lesson Scott and his kind will never learn.

Tell him, if you will, I would as soon agree to swim my way back to New Zealand as consent to another season under his command. I shall take the ship in February and wash my hands of it. Tell him: a man who sits in his tent in the Antarctic and whines about the weather is unfit to lead.

(HE PRESSES HIS PALM AGAINST THE BANDAGED EYE) Damn this thing!

Where does he think he is, the Isle of Man?

(From “Judgement Over The Dead” by Trevor Griffiths – the screenplay of “The Last Place on Earth” Verso, London, 1986)