Drama on the high seas

Richard Bean's enthralling play about Hull trawlermen who risk their lives by fishing on wild seas is not just social realism infused with raw humour.

Admittedly it offers vivid, violent vignettes of a life reeling and rolling on ocean waves and of the fishermen's grim, precarious livelihood. And Richard Wilson's powerful, beautifully acted production is bolstered by Gareth Fry's stormy second act sound-effects that contribute to the mood of dizzying suspense.

The fishermen under the whaleback, which is the curved deck at the bow, are hurled again and again from their seats. The ship's lights flicker and in the intimacy of the Theatre Upstairs, it almost felt as if the floor under us shook and shuddered, too.

Yet these are only atmospheric vignettes in the play's grand plan. Bean may sound a requiem for fishermen laid low and unemployed by the decline and fall of the industry, but such polemical accusations are peripheral. Within the framework of a play about men struggling for economic and personal survival, Bean is concerned with paternity and traditions of secrecy and concealment. He deals with a man who has never met his son, but finally identifies himself; with a son who never met his father but longs to know about him.

Each act is staged in a different ship and different decade, but always in cramped, claustrophobic crew quarters designed by Julian McGowan. In 1965, Cassidy, an alcoholic old deckhand, played with spell-binding charm and cynical exuberance by Alan Williams meets Iain McKee's gauche teenage "deckie learner" Darrell.

This meeting proves both revelatory and life-saving for Darrell who reappears in 1972 as a canny deckhand in a catastrophic storm where Matthew Dunster's Norman in David Bowie T-shirt and Y-fronts worn over women's tights and Richard

Stacey's Roc squabble over a girl, despite appearing smitten with each other.

In the final act, the crew quarters have been rebuilt in a Heritage museum where middle-aged Darrell (now played by Alan Williams) works after 25 years of being unemployed. Pat, a crazy, young entrepreneur, played by an unfairly cool Matthew Dunster arrives to inflict a horrific, misdirected revenge upon Darrell. He, like Cassidy and Darrell and their fathers, is a victim of this cruel, deepsea fishing tradition which Bean brings to memorable theatrical life.

Under The Whaleback