SOME psychologists will tell you that early teens is the worst time for major life crises, like divorce or death, and one thing you learn in life is that nobody, absolutely nobody, can tell you how to grieve. It is something you have to find out for yourself.

Bright-but-stroppy Rory is 15, and suddenly faced with the death of her beloved father in a road accident. Of course her mother is doing everything wrong, organising the wrong sort of funeral, a cremation with the wrong sort of urn for the ashes. The wrong people are saying the wrong things and Rory is supposed to cope with them as her mother weeps in the garden.

Confused and furious, she realises the one thing she can do is to fulfil her geography teacher father’s lifelong wish to visit the North Pole, and so, armed with totally inadequate clothes and her mother’s “borrowed” credit card, she stows the urn in her flimsy backpack and heads for Svalbard and beyond. Her father, so embarrassing in life as a teacher at Rory’s school, had planned out the trip in his journal, so it can’t be that difficult, can it?

Tatty Hennessy’s play A Hundred Words for Snow is all about the trip that Aurora, named after the Northern Lights and known only as Rory, takes to scatter her father’s ashes … and she is such a child.

When Mark Payne discovered this full-length play, written as a monologue, he knew immediately that he wanted to direct it at the venue where he has directed and acted for many many years. That required not only an exceptional actress, but the confidence that it would attract an audience over a six-night run. But then, he had Amy McIntosh (making her Swan debut) and the regular supporters of Yeovil’s intimate amateur Swan Theatre.

And at the end of the first performance, the sold-out audience was on its feet cheering a remarkable performance in a funny, poignant and very unusual play that will stay in the memory for a very long time.

Amy, a drama teacher in Dorset, known by Yeovil audiences as Laurey in the 2024 YAOS Oklahoma!, is totally convincing as this shy, spiky teenager, lacking in confidence but looking for the adventure she and her dad always discussed – “he was an explorer, in his head”. Just the feat of memorising 40 dense pages of script to be performed alone on stage with few props and occasional lighting cues to change the scene is enough, but to do it with such charm, conviction and passion is truly astonishing.

A Hundred Words for Snow – a reference to what so many, mistakenly, say about the Inuit language – is on until Saturday, and almost all the seats are filled. If you can get a spare ticket, you won’t regret it … and you won’t forget it either.

GP-W