The first preview audience is due to sit down in a few hours and Sydney Theatre Company is still working out what will be the right amount of onstage snow to drop on the cast of Patricia Cornelius’s drama Do Not Go Gentle.

Inspired in part by Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed expedition to the South Pole, Do Not Go Gentle is being presented on a Roslyn Packer Theatre stage that has been turned into an imagined Antarctic landscape; a world of endless ice, swept by powerful blizzards.

Philip Quast in rehearsals for Sydney Theatre Company’s Do Not Go Gentle. Photo © Prudence Upton

The cast has been working hard to come to terms with this unusual working environment, says actor Philip Quast, who, earlier in rehearsals, “copped a fluffball of snow” in the mouth.

“I turned into the wind and opened my mouth to take a big breath before saying the line and the flakes went straight in,” Quast says. “The snow is made from potato starch so it’s edible and harmless, it just dissolves, but I had to have a big cough and drink a lot of water.”

Returning to the stage...