It’s a question that those running or visiting the National, where much of Tony Harrison’s Fram is actually set, must often ask themselves. It’s a question that Harrison, who famously translated the Oresteia for the theatre, asks directly in the awkward, troubling, sometimes stomach-turning verse play he and Bob Crowley have co-directed: what’s the use of Aeschylus in Darfur or, indeed, of any art in a world of war and famine?

It’s also a question Harrison poses in an odd way. His play opens in Westminster Abbey, where Jeff Rawle’s tubby, stuffy Gilbert Murray, himself a translator of Aeschylus, rises from his grave and leads another resurrected inmate, Siân Thomas’s Sybil Thorndike, over the Thames and into the National. There he stages a play about, of all unlikely people, the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who sailed deep into the Arctic in 1893 in the ship Fram, or Forward and, sharing the trip and one smelly sleeping bag with a sullen aide called Johansen, trekked further north than anyone before.

A brisk yet suave Jasper Britton and a doleful Mark Addy bring these warring men to life both then and afterwards, when Britton’s Nansen is helping starving Russians on behalf of the League of Nations and Addy’s Johansen has committed suicide and become a cynical ghost. So what’s the connection between this and Lapland? Not a lot, except that much is made of Nansen’s rejection of his Darwinian beliefs for a new humanitarianism. He was happy to see the dogs that drove his sledge devour each other, but, faced with human dog-eat-dog in a cold and equally hostile Volgan wilderness, he changes his ideological tune.

With the Abbey’s stained glass giving way to splintered ice, and a ballet at the Bolshoi eventually ceding to the upended Fram, Crowley’s designs are pretty spectacular. But doubts intrude.

That the verse is seldom up to Harrison’s best rhyming standards may not matter, since the pretence is that it’s by the duller Gilbert Murray. But there’s too much that’s pointlessly jokey — why dwell on Murray’s resentment of T.S. Eliot? — and more that’s irrelevant.

Still, Harrison’s heart isn’t just on his sleeve. There’s a very modern conversation about how to publicise need and ask for charity, which embraces Murray’s belief that poetry can “give focus to our suffering and our pain” and some American relief workers’ contempt for poetry, drama and culture. But then Thomas’s fine Thorndike transforms herself into a starving Volgan and delivers a speech in which she vividly, gruesomely, evokes cannibalism, making her hearers, like last night’s audience, feel its horrors. So, who knows, maybe there’s purpose in poetry and the theatre after all.

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