Chris Eldon Lee reviews Happenstance Theatre Company’s “The Boat Factory” which is at Clwyd Theatr Cymru until May 18th 2013.
The process of this play is a bit like building a boat.
First, the keel of the ship (the premise of the play) is laid out with perfect precision. Considerable time is then spent shaping the symmetry of the hull (as the drama is constructed) and you can only fully admire it when the finishing touches reveal the craftsmanship involved.
Picking up my tickets, the box office lady said (pun intended) that she’d found The Boat Factory ‘riveting’. As with ship building itself, the play is a slow and meticulous process that, inch by inch, hauls you in.
The two actors Dan Gordon and Michael Condron have limited material to work with.
The set is a rudimentary beer crate and scaffold affair and, on the Monday night I saw it, there were more sound effect seagulls than audience members. But Gordon has done his research impeccably and has fashioned a string of beautifully descriptive, atmospheric and evocative episodes from it.
The human storyline feels slight and Dan Gordon wisely draws upon his comic strip namesake ‘Flash’ and the legend of Moby Dick to enhance it. Only as the final decking is laid do you realise that he’s actually writing about and playing his own dad, who spent 50 years as a carpenter at Harland and Wolff.
Dan Gordon is Ulster’s Laurie Lee, writing about childhood and family with utmost authenticity – and playing his father with deeply determined eyes. His solidity is counterbalanced by Michael Condron’s wicked truculence as he plays his crippled workmate Geordie and almost everyone else in Gordon Senior’s ship building world. And such is the understanding between the actors, they can swap hats in the middle of a fight scene and play each other’s character without a second’s pause. It’s like Port and Starboard personified.
In the enthusiasm for detail, the narrative does tend to get parked occasionally. Like a vessel in a storm, the production rolls about. At times it’s an illustrated lecture on how Mr Harland met Mr Wolff, and a disclaimer about how the Titanic was “alright when she left us”.
And then there are longish accounts of a carpenter’s trade. I enjoyed the descriptions of the timber; where it came from and what it tasted like. But I’m not sure I needed such a complete inventory of every kind of hammer they used.
Gordon peppers his play with a range of delicious and occasionally dubious anecdotes that bring out the best of Condron’s comic talents. From the top of the swaying scaffold, the two men convey a remarkable sense of the sheer scale of the boat yard in which a thousand ships were created from sheer sweat and toil. And the dialogue is interfused with the seeds of the destruction of the man, working in a snowstorm of asbestos, and the demise of shipbuilding generally at the advent of the jumbo jet.
We must give thanks to Clwyd’s Festival of Celtic Theatre, but for which “The Boat Factory” would never have sailed our way. And I wish them well as they cross the Atlantic in June for the Brits Off Broadway Festival. New York’s Irish community will love seeing it, before rushing home to scour their family trees.
Visit www.clwyd-theatr-cymru.co.uk for bookings & information about Clwyd Theatr Cymru.