There is a tension from the off between the tragic and comic in Richard Bean’s drama about the trawler fishing industry. A vessel has sunk off the coast of Iceland. Fifteen men are dead. Their families need to be informed and it is up to the company boss to manage the crisis. Amid the gloom, there are nervy balls of humour as characters swirl through his Hull office.
Set in the mid-1970s, this is a return to the muscular world of the fishing industry for Bean who wrote his award-winning play, Under the Whaleback, two decades ago. This time we see life through the eyes of the capitalist proprietor of a fishing fleet, Donald Claxton (John Hollingworth), who hails from a long line of fishers.
“You’ve got to learn to close your heart,” advises his father (Paul Hickey) as Donald prepares to meet the fishers’ widows, and we hear an unnerving recording of the dead skipper’s last words as the ship rolls into icy seas.
But the play changes direction so radically between the first and second acts that it feels like it has entered entirely new waters. The enticing dramatic threads of the first act – the burden of lost lives bristling against Claxton’s inheritance and instinct for profit as well as a possible romance – disappear in a second act that takes us to Reykjavik, where the ship’s survivors are camping out. From here, the play loses its tension and runs aground.
Directed by Emily Burns, it is original to have this switch and it leaves the ground open for confrontation between the casual workers who risk their lives for the job and the boss who exploits them: we wait for the cranking up of guilt, anger, responsibility.
But the face-offs have no emotional weight or honesty. Instead, it all becomes baggy and aimless. The ship’s survivors are picaresque creations: Jack (Matthew Durkan) is comically angry, Snacker (Adam Hugill) a relentless Lothario, Baggie (Matt Sutton), the straight-man, and Quayle (Hickey), an Irishman and old sea dog with stories about the forces of fate. Einhildur (Sophie Cox), the owner of the hotel in which they are holed up, is a surly Icelandic woman who looks as if she has drifted in from a 1970s sitcom.
Claxton turns mainly into their observer and his confrontation with Jack is toothless, even when a knife is produced. The tone veers into a Men Behaving Badly melange of japes, antics and storytelling. There is little sense these men have survived a trauma and lost friends although a coffin is carried in, fleetingly touching on Faulknerian territory, but it goes nowhere. Neither do the ghost stories that the men interminably tell.
Is this a comedy about a tragedy? A ghost-led metaphor for the hollowing out of the British fishing industry as the Icelandic government excludes foreign trawlers from their fishing grounds?
We return at the end to Claxton’s meeting with the widows and it is a haunting moment. This play seems like a powerful one, while the comic one contains its own pace and drama, but the two smother each other sutured together as they are.
• At Hampstead theatre, London, until 23 November
