Gritty, spooky and enthralling, Richard Bean’s new play is one part terse workplace drama, one part folkloric storytelling session. No, no, wait, it’s miles better than that sounds.
It’s set in the mid-Seventies when the brutal and precarious livelihoods of trawlermen in Hull’s distant water fishing fleet were curtailed by restrictions preventing them working within 200 miles of Iceland in the so-called Cod Wars. It explores the lives of braggardly and sometimes horrible men with sympathy but no false romanticism, in authentically broad accents and opaque jargon. I was gripped throughout.
The two constants in Bean’s writing are its variety of style and theme – you never know what to expect from him – and a playful desire to push comic riffs to their absolute limit. Hull-born, he explored below-decks trawler life in 2003’s Under the Whaleback, but here opens on company director Donald Claxton (John Hollingworth)), first of his family to go to university rather than to sea.
One of Claxton’s ships, the Graham Greene, capsized in an icy storm with the loss of its skipper and most of the crew. He is to embark on the “Widows’ Walk”, visiting each bereaved household on foot. The tragedy and its answering ritual are a background hum as he wrangles with his father, debates with a young priest, summarily sacks a captain and flirts with a fishwife whose husband Jack (to her regret) survived the sinking. There’s much incidental talk of fish hauls, tonnage and the work cycle of a trawlerman – three weeks on, three days off.
It's a subtle slice of realism played out on Anna Reid’s meticulous Seventies office set, where hints and snippets of conversation allow us to infer reams of information. Big surprise, then, when we’re transported in the second act to an equally vivid Reykjavik hotel bar where three of the survivors and the sardonic young patroness exchange banter and bullshit. Claxton’s appearance prompts tales of loss, ghost stories, and a sense that some violent sacrifice is required.
Director Emily Burns lets the play unfold at a naturalistic pace even when it takes bizarre or magical turns, and the performances are superb. Hollingworth is charismatic but contained as the conflicted Claxton. Matthew Durkan is astonishing as a groovy young vicar and then hypertense Jack: endlessly unable to understand the metaphor about urinating on somebody who’s on fire, suddenly murderous about the loss of his “favourite finger” to frostbite.
There’s lovely work from Paul Hickey as a riddling ancient mariner, Matt Sutton as a gentle bosun awaiting news of his child’s birth amid much death, and Adam Hugill as the young, randy and charmingly dimwitted “deckie learner” (apprentice). The travails of the women in this world are mostly viewed through a macho, male filter, but Laura Elsworthy (as Jack’s “superspicious” wife) and Sophie Cox (as Claxton’s perky secretary and as eye-rolling hotelier Einhildur) make their mark.
Contemporary parallels about insecure employment and Britain’s relationship with its European neighbours are present but not overstressed. As with other Bean plays – One Man, Two Guvnors; The Heretic – I went in clueless and came out buzzing.
Hampstead Theatre, to November 23; hampsteadtheatre.com
