Tom Crean - Antarctic Explorer

The Fringe wouldn't be the Fringe without a biographical one-man play at the Assembly Rooms. After Orson Welles and Alex Higgins, this year it's the turn of one of the great, yet largely unsung, heroes of Antarctic exploration, Tom Crean.

An Irishman who joined the Royal Navy to spite his father, he joined Scott's Discovery expedition and then his ill-fated race for the South Pole. He could have been one of the final group, none of whom survived, but for a cough that ruled him out. Instead, after a three-man trek back to base camp that went wrong, he achieved his own special niche in Antarctic history with a 36 mile solo trek to alert the team to the plight of the two he had left behind.

As if that wasn't enough he was back the next year, this time with Shackleton on Endurance when she was trapped and crushed by the ice. He was part of the crew that made the impossible rescue trip in a 21-foot lifeboat, and one of those who crossed the South Georgia mountains to find a whaling station that could provide help and rescue. Not a man was lost.

As he tells us, he didn't keep a diary so his name was largely forgotten while he quietly kept a pub in Ireland until his death, the unassuming holder of three Polar Medals and the Albert Medal for bravery.

I say tells us because Aiden Dooley seems to be the man himself, full of humour and good yarns about his times in sub-zero temperatures. He's a man who wants us to understand what it was like there and why he kept returning.

As he puts on the clothes he wore and tries to convey the sense of cold, of emptiness and the power of the weather, we start to feel we begin to know. Then we get the stories of his two epic rescues and we realise that we have no true idea at all.

This is a grippingly vivid, surprisingly funny account of sheer heroism in the face of impossible odds. Thank you, Aiden Dooley, for allowing us the privilege of spending 75 minutes in Tom Crean's wonderful company.