In 2005, Richard Bean won acclaim and the George Devine Award for Under the Whaleback, which presented life on the trawlers of Hull’s Distant Water fishing fleet. In that, as he says in an interview in the programme for this new play, he eulogised the deckhands, but here he invites the audience to empathise, if not necessarily sympathise, with the capitalist.
It is February 1976, and Donald Claxton is now running the trawler company his father William headed for 40 years. His dad is retired but can’t keep away from the dock where his life was lived, especially now when a ship has been lost. William may have become inured to such tragedies, but Cambridge-educated Donald is more sensitive and can’t avoid feelings of guilt. He is preparing himself for making the traditional Widows’ Walk: going from house to house offering condolences to the widow of every man whose life has been lost when his ship the Graham Greene went down off the coast of Iceland.
The first act is in Claxton’s office, where we hear conversation with his captains and others on the speakerphone and he gets visits not just from his father but from the new-in-post vicar who will lead the service after the Widows Walk, a captain he has called in to sack and Lizzie Jopling, the wife of one of the sunk ship’s survivors.
John Hollingworth gives a strong central performance as Claxton, a mixture of hard-nosed and sensitive. He doesn’t really want to know details about his deckhands; the ship’s runner will brief him for the letters he will write to each widow. He admits that “each letter of heartfelt condolence is complete bollocks”, but shows remarkable understanding when Lizzie, who is there worried for her teenage son who has been signed on to another boat, confesses that she had hoped that her abusive husband Jack had been drowned. Laura Elsworthy’s Lizzie, who wants a new life for herself and her son, may offer something for Claxton too.
The second act takes us to Iceland, with Anna Reid’s detailed office set converting into a rather seedy looking hotel where the survivors from the Graham Greene are knocking back an odd mixture of alcohol-free beer and potent brennivin watched over by hotelier Einhildur (Sophie Cox, who has already played Claxton’s efficient assistant in the first act).
Jack Jopling, waving a frostbitten finger due for amputation, is objectionably hyperactive but a bit slow at understanding things. Matthew Durkan manages to suggest his inner problems as well as showing why his wife would like to be rid of him—a man very different from his with-it young priest in act one.
Adam Hugill, already seen as the naïvely enthusiastic young captain being sacked (not least for having been so proud of finding fish that he broadcast their location to every competitor, though there is also another back-story where he is concerned) is now young Snacker, relatively new to trawling and not really made for it, but who has a nice line in mnemonics when he is not chatting up Einhildur.
Matt Sutton plays bosun Baggie, whose wife is expecting a baby any minute (their fifth)—he is a gentle chap despite the hard life he leads—and Paul Hickey follows his very real elder Claxton with another fine performance as Quayle, an old salt full of stories.
They are joined unexpectedly by Claxton, who has flown in to give support, and that leads to some confrontations and a succession of sea stories in which Bean, sometimes a little uncomfortably, juggles tragedy and laughs until Hollingworth’s Claxton movingly tells his own story of his Widows’ Walk.
These men had a tough life working on exploitive contracts. They are now all out of work! But it isn’t just the conditions on the job and the danger that they have to cope with. Baggie isn’t there when his baby is born, nor was for the babies before. It is wild Jack who rather surprisingly remarks, “that’s the worst thing about fishing. You miss the best bits of our own life.”
Emily Burns focuses her production on character as she handles this mixture of moods, with Oliver Fenwick’s lighting and Christopher Shutt’s sound making important contributions. Sea shanties frame the play which celebrates a past workforce: the hotel bar’s television even gives us the Althing vote that extended Iceland’s exclusive fishing zone to 200 miles, so effectively tolling the death knell of Hull’s Distant Water fleet