Review: Unsinkable at the Hope Street Theatre ****

An excerpt of Unsinkable reached the final of Tip Tray Theatre’s 2025 What Happens Next? new writing competition.

What happened next was a sold-out staged reading of the Titanic-themed drama, and now finally, this week, a much-anticipated, full-length, five performance run at the Hope Street Theatre.

There have been several maritime disasters with much greater loss of life – both in war and in peace. And yet more than a century after it had its fateful meeting with an iceberg in the freezing waters of the Atlantic, it's Titanic whose story, recounted in many forms, continues to capture the imagination.

As someone whose great-grandfather was one of the men at Harland and Wolff who built Titanic (see the photo below), I admit that's been the case for me.

Although the White Star Line and its preternaturally confident chairman J Bruce Ismay never actually described the company’s superstar ship as ‘unsinkable’, that was certainly the impression given ahead of its maiden voyage – an impression which added to the public condemnation in the wake of its infamous sinking.

Writer and director Matt Reynolds’ riveting new play isn’t about the sinking itself however, but rather the aftermath and how those few horrifying early-morning April hours in the mid-Atlantic affected those who survived them, most notably Ismay himself.

Saying that, while the bulk of the action is concentrated in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, there are scene-setting flashbacks and towards the close there is also an element of ‘what happened next’ for the story’s small cast of real-life characters.

Reynolds (whose own great-grandfather worked for the White Star Line) has used transcripts from the official inquiries on both sides of the Atlantic, along with contemporaneous newspaper reports, survivor testimonies and private correspondence to weave a fascinating narrative.

Above: This reviewer's great grandfather in the turning shop at Harland and Wolff in Belfast c1905-10. Top: Joseph Winder (centre) as J Bruce Ismay with the cast of Unsinkable.

A youthful Ismay (Joseph Winder) is portrayed as a man of energy, drive, vision, charm and cockiness, and vaunting personal ambition – underpinned by a desire to live up to, and emerge from the shadow of, his father who founded the Liverpool shipping line.

Looking for a USP in the competitive world of transatlantic travel, he alights upon the idea of elegance and comfort over speed, and the apotheosis of this ideal is Titanic, the largest, most technologically advanced and most luxuriously appointed liner ever built. It is the epitome of the (about to vanish) Edwardian world. On the class-divided upper decks at least.

The rest is infamy.

The play opens with a powerful recitation of a few names of the lost, all of them woman and children, followed by the appearance of a handful of bedraggled survivors who provide their details and testimony of events.

Among them are a pair of American socialites - the force of nature that is Margaret ‘the unsinkable Molly’ Brown (Alice McKillop) and the more reserved Marian Thayer (Emily Guilfoyle), wife of an East Coast railroad magnate; sternly dutiful Second Officer Charles Lightoller (Charlie Forrest), the most senior surviving member of crew, and White Star stewardess Violet Jessup (Lorna Jane Ryan) - herself dubbed Miss Unsinkable for the dubious distinction of also surviving the Olympic’s prang with HMS Hawke in 2011 and then, as a VAD in the First World War, the sinking of their sister ship HMHS Britannic which struck a mine in the Aegean in 1916.

And Ismay of course, whose is given short shrift by Christopher Forrest’s unnamed (fictional) Inquirer, a bluff northern investigator who challenges the ship owner’s actions and decisions, both before and during the voyage, as well as acting as a guide to the unfolding action and – in one uproarious scene - as a kind of carnival barker.

Forrest’s caustic 'MC' distributes contemporary newspapers’ lurid and fantastical headlines (much along the lines of Freddie Starr ate my hamster) which paint the hapless Ismay as a moustache-twirling pantomime villain. They’re seized upon by the cast in a vividly and entertainingly realised whirlwind of brisk vignettes – there’s even a sly nod to the most famous, much-parodied scene in James Cameron’s cinematic blockbuster in there.

It’s a bit of much-needed light relief in an emotionally charged and weighty 90 minutes.

Above: Christopher Forrest as the Inquirer.

In an introduction in the show’s programme, Clifford Ismay (yes, a relation) describes Unsinkable as illuminating ‘the human decisions, hopes and frailties that shaped that fateful night’.

If it’s a tragedy of immense proportions for more than 1,500 people to perish, it’s also a tragedy on a human scale for Ismay to survive.

None of us can know how we will act in moments of extremis; a realisation brought home by the drama in the skies over Saudi Arabia this week. Would we choose self-sacrifice or self-preservation?

Winder is compelling as a man who in the moment chooses life - but then struggles to live with himself. At one point he muses on how if he’d gone down with the ship, history would have decreed him a hero.

Meanwhile his American wife Florence (Rosabelle Bennett), shunned by society and shamed by his survival, refuses to talk about it, so he opens up instead to the widowed Mrs Thayer who offers emotional support and understanding, but is also fighting her own demons. In fact, every survivor finds life is seismically altered by the tragedy.

Reynolds and Winder bring nuance to the press’s arch villain, giving we the audience permission to empathise with a human being struggling with what we’d now recognise as PTSD.

The rest of the cast offer strong support with some characterful and thoughtful performances.

The only thing missing from the story is a representative of the mass of humanity trapped in steerage; Mrs Brown becomes their voice and advocate. I don’t know if this was a conscious decision, but I suppose there is an argument to be made that the omission avoids the danger of creating an unsatisfactory stereotype ‘every man/woman’ - or a twee one like Titanic’s Jack.

And Reynolds and his cast certainly sidestep stereotypes and tweeness to present an impressive piece of storytelling that everyone, from a student of human nature to a full-blown Titaniac, should appreciate.