The Man Who Left the Titanic

The Everyman Palace, Cork

Rather like the ship it commemorates, the play is punctured below the water-line by its hidden challenges. As Chairman of the ship’s White Star Line, Bruce Ismay was vilified in a vengeful press campaign as “the most despised man in the world” for taking to the a lifeboat while more than a thousand fellow-passengers were left to die.

Writer Patrick Prior has devised this piece as a nightly conversation, a horror in itself, between Ismay and the accusatory ghost of the ship’s engineer Thomas Andrews, described by Ismay in one of the play’s attractive phrases as a hero in sepia.

Heckled by Dave Marsden’s Andrews, Ismay emerges from this treatment as a self-pitying snob; class-consciousness was certainly an element in the subsequent inquiries into the Titanic disaster, although millionaires as well as aristocrats were among the doomed. The debate may not be still raging, but its embers can be blown to indignant life for the centenary of the ship’s launch at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast.

As treated in this Isosceles production however it is all a little bit limp. Aware that there is a new generation ignorant, save for a glamorous film, of the human audit, Prior loads the script with detail in which, incidentally, the term “womenandchildren” becomes a collective noun, repeated and without differentiation.

Beneath the irritations of erratic background music and Pat Abernathy’s worryingly prolonged pauses as Ismay, lurks the issues of character and reputation: did Ismay encourage more ambitious speed through the looming ice-field?

Was he understandably human in his choice to save himself or was he another Titanic victim, persecuted forever by society’s determination to deflect responsibility from those who caused the tragedy and onto those who survived it?

Runs until Saturday