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Titans

TITANS was a site-specific play for Kabosh theatre company for the opening of the Titanic Belfast building on the centenary of the ship’s sinking. The play’s run was sold out. It required a piece that responded to the building and travelled through it, setting some unique challenges for its author both in the writing and staging. It was also designed to be seen by a non-traditional theatre audience, so it had to have a narrative that would capture and maintain attention. The story of the Titanic is often glossed as a fable about how man’s over-reaching will be punished by the universe. The play turned this on its head by inviting us to empathise with a shipyard preacher who belonged to an esoteric cult, and who forged himself an immortal soul of steel. But when his wife and daughter are lost on ther Titanic, he finds that he cannot join them in the afterlife. The play follows his journey through the building as he completes a ritual to get his soul back, which can only be performed on the centenary of the launching of the ship. On the way he is both assisted and obstructed by the ghosts who have found a home in the building – an opium-addicted Ismay trapped in a kind of hell by his conscience, stewardess Violet Jessop who is confined to a kind of purgatory forged from simultaneous urges to serve and rebel, and John Quinn, a shipyard radical who punctures the very idea of celebrating the Titanic and who has found a place in heaven (the free bar at the top of the building). The Preacher is finally, and unexpectedly, reunited with his loved ones (with the injunction that they cannot speak or touch) on the roof of the building.