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.
