COLUMN
I won’t be in theatres with a notebook as much as usual this month – time for some wider, wetter horizons – but may be musing, as I often do, on how rare it is for theatre to express a convincing reality about the oceans and the trade or pursuit of seafaring. It’s easy for films – all that CGI, great sweeping pans across the waves to bring home the immensity and strangeness, the threat and joy of the element. Plenty of thrills in the cinema, whether you prefer the melancholy loneliness of Crowhurst, the period gung-ho of Napoleonic wars, or that yachting thriller with Nicole Kidman in a very impractical onboard bra-slip fighting off a psychopath.
But in stage plays the sea is a metaphor, a bit of language, or else, at best, a backdrop. Maybe the action is taking place on the docks, as in Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge, or else by the seaside, as in innumerable British comedies. Or maybe the seafaring all happened in the past, and now the lost sailor is coming back, usually having been thoroughly de-socialised by a lifetime at sea.
There was an excellent play this year about Harvard political de-platforming, called Power of Sail, with a promising picture of a model yacht on the posters; but alas, apart from a ropey metaphor about steam giving way to sail, it only applies to the model in the Harvard professor’s study because its white mainsail looks sufficiently like a Ku Klux Klan hood to set the political theme. The model gets wrecked by a student protester’s brick through the window, anyway.
Life at sea, however – the daily effort, the life of a crew confined by both small space and mutual life-and-death responsibility? You don’t find that so much in live drama.
Playwrights do sometimes try: Eugene O’Neill wrote seven sea plays, but they’re rarely seen. Shakespeare allowed us a good storm, with quarrelling alarm onboard, at the start of The Tempest, which directors either overdo or grumpily ignore.
Otherwise what? Life of Pi is a rare exception, since it’s nearly all set at sea, and the puppetry was fantastic; but being stuck in a lifeboat with a tiger is, to say the least, untypical. Musicals do better, but like Anything Goes, they’re likely to be more about big liner passengers than the crew. The newer Titanic musical is pretty good, and does express a sense of the sea. But the most seafaring of all seafaring tales is Moby-Dick, which failed as a musical in the 1990s and then became a play-within-a-musical about schoolgirls doing it, which was even worse.
Being stuck in a lifeboat with a tiger is, to say the least, untypical
But suddenly, without me and my critic’s notebook having held out m
