A HARD AND ICY WORLD
A 1970’s Hull folksong chorus: “Next time you see a trawlerman on Hessle Road half tight – remember, o remember, the perils of that night”. It was a tribute to three distant-waters boats and crews lost in one storm: it made the national news. But many more were lost, barely reported, in an industry more dangerous than any other of the time: single deaths from drowning or machinery, whole boats lost beyond the Arctic Circle in the Cod War years before Iceland’s 200-mile limit (a late twist in Richard Bean’s play).
Bean wrote Under the Whaleback about the lives of such fishermen, rich with conversations and empathy. It is not hard to shudder at the casualness with which big money treats the lives and deaths of a casual workforce. Maxine Peake wrote a striking play about Lillian Billocca, the ‘headscarf revolutionary” who in 1968 campaigned to force better safety standards.
But in this new play Bean widens the story in a way that – at its best – sends ripples of understanding that there could be the human cost on both sides of capitalism. In the first act we find John Hollingworth as Donald, heir of family shipowners, taking down figures by radio about catches and returns, bickering with his old father who hasn’t quite given up control, and confronting the fact that the loss of 15 men in a sinking means that tomorrow he must do “the walk” to condole with the widows and mothers (the tough old man offers salty advice about accepting tea and not looking at the children). He is also sacking a skipper, back from another 6000-mile run with too little catch , who also sinned by admitting by radio that he’d found fish. Donald roars that Grimsby boats would thus steal `“My cod and my haddock..yes they fucking are mine, if you were using my ten thousand pound Marconi Marine Fishgraph 2 fucking fish finder! Do you not understand capitalism?”
But he is not a monster: one of the wives (Laura Ellsworthy) rolls in, boots and headscarf, fresh from the filleting-shed. He treats her decently and responds to her fears for a son and to her (slightly shocking) admission that she’d rather her rough husband – one of the five survivors in this latest loss – was not coming home for his three-day break between three-week journeys. It’s an intriguing encounter, his softening foreseeing what happens in the second act.
For – and this Bean bases on a real shipowner – Donald suddenly decides to go to Reykjavik , meet the survivors and fly them home rather than the utilitarian norm of putting them on the next boat. So we are in a small hotel, with three men rescued, the body of a fourth and some very entertaining laddish bickering, plus dark violent fury from Jack (Mattthew Durkan) about his injured finger. Eventually a fifth arrives – Paul Hickey as Quayle. He had got taken off two days earlier with a premonition, faking illness. He’s the storyteller, rich in horrid tales and superstitions lyrically delivered. Quiet Baggie and dopey Snacker (ogling the manageress, Einhildur) complete the group, until to their shock the boss, Donald himself, walks in . Jack muses on whether they should kill him. He’s not serious. Yet. But as the long, strange act rolls on a knife appears, and the surreal midnight scene thickens into weirdness. Sometimes the act slows too much, as such a night might well do. But Sophie Cox as Einhildur, the one woman among them, adds weight : both with short-tempered commonsense and an Icelandic oddity in a fable she tells about love, death, ice and a ghost.
So there are the opposite poles of capitalism – big money taking money risks (“I lose three thousand a day staying in port”) and vulnerable, zero-hours employees taking the real risks in the ice, while as Quayle says “the women are left with the eternal glory of their widowhood”. Donald knows it all in his heart: constantly plays back the last words on the radio of a dying skipper (these are real, from the period) “Going over – going over – love and crew’s love to the wives and families” . Quayle knows it too. The word “dignity” about the corpse enrages him. “Three weeks sharing a focsle the size of a prison cell with eight other fools, sucking in their farts, their ciggy smoke, pissing on yer hands five times a day to convince the blood of life that it’s still worth the flow – the day he went fishing was the day he lost his dignity”.
And another darkly interesting detail in Donald’s earlier brief conversation with a new vicar about a memorial service . The hymn “For those in peril on the sea” will, says the shipowner patiently, see half the congregation walk out. Too naval and romantic . “Makes dying at sea seem something noble and patriotic” rather than having died for half a fish and chip supper.
But in the final moments in the Reykjavik bar, the men sing their own song. Humans can’t lose all dignity.
hampsteadtheatre.com to 23 nov
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