When the time comes to summarise this theatrical year, the hollow accolade for most peculiar evening will surely go to poet Tony Harrison’s escalatingly bizarre rhyming verse drama. Nominally taking as its subject the long-forgotten Norwegian Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen, it soon resembles nothing so much as a punishingly pretentious theatre studies project mounted by a student who has overdosed on Brecht.

Before we get anywhere near Nansen, we have Harrison’s framing device to grind through. Thus, naturally, in modern-day Westminster Abbey, the late Greek professor Gilbert Murray is revivified, rouses actress Sybil Thorndike from her eternal slumbers and announces, for reasons that are never even glanced at, that he’s going to stage a play at the National — how the student must be chortling at his self-reflexive cleverness — called, ho ho, Fram.

Cue video footage of Murray (Jeff Rawle, doing his best with this nonsense) and Thorndike (Sian Thomas, likewise) arriving on the South Bank. If this were 1998, we’d be amazed at the technological prowess.

The problem with Harrison’s writing — and it’s a hefty problem, given a running time of nearly three hours — is that virtually nothing happens. Instead we have lots of people describing things they have done or are about to do. Plus a long solo from a ballerina, a Kurdish poet with his eyes sewn up and some African stowaways.

Nansen (Jasper Britton) eventually comes on looking chilly, Harrison dangles the possibility of an odd-couple comedy in the frozen north, there are a couple of jokes about farting then it’s off to Moscow for an opera (Nansen did sterling relief work for the Russian famine of 1921).

It doesn’t help that the piece is directed by Harrison and designer Bob Crowley, meaning there is no one left to suggest slashing superfluous words and sets, or to ask the simple but lethal question: what the hell is this meant to be? It flirts with everything, including a classics comedy in the vein of Stoppard’s The Invention of Love but pulls nothing, leaving poor Nansen stranded as a supporting player in his own story.

Britton commands the Olivier stage impressively when he’s given the chance but Harrison provides no clue as to what motivated the man.

An Arctic winter would seem delightful by comparison.

Until 22 May (020 7452 3000, www.nationaltheatre.org.uk)