Forward was partly inspired by a ten-day sailing expedition around the Svalbard Archipelago, located halfway between Norway and the North Pole. Spanning a hundred years and thousands of kilometres from the sixtieth parallel north to the top of the world, Forward presents a poetic history of energy development in Norway, from the initial passion that drove explorer Fridtjof Nansen to the North Pole to the consequences of decades of our addiction to fossil fuels. Using a blend of theatre and electropop music, the play progresses backwards from 2013 to 1893 and zeroes in on close to forty characters whose day-to-day lives illustrate how the choices we make often have unintended consequences. Woven through this history is the passionate love affair between Nansen and sea ice, embodied as a character in the play. Expressing herself only through song, Ice, who has waited for millennia for the arrival of her lover, is bracing to meet her destiny. A relay race through time, where each generation passes the baton to the next, Forward takes a compassionate look at the legacies we leave behind and what we are willing to do for love.