The Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast will always be best know to those on the outside as the factory that built the Titanic, but Happenstance Theatre Company’s latest piece gives you the skinny from the inside.
Writer Dan Gordon plays Davy Gordon, a worker in the ‘Boat Factory’, perhaps a relative as most of Dan’s family worked in the place at one time or another, and Dan grew up in its shadow. “It just sits there,” says Davy, “wheezing and groaning and smoking. A city within a city.”
The piece is a love letter to this special place he both misses and once feared, when family, friends, acquaintances would hobble home with missing fingers, broken toes, wounds of all kinds (“At the Boat Factory, health and safety was never an issue”).
Mobile-faced Michael Condron plays every other character in the piece (32 in all) from Davy’s gran and grandpa, through to the distinctly odd Clifford who’s refrain –“Do you wanna go fishing for pigeons?” – sounds like an old music hall number, and who’s not allowed matches since he burnt his grannie’s budgie.
Condron finally settles on Wee Geordie Kilpatrick, a man crippled with polio, who has a strange sense of humour and a Moby Dick obsession. He soon becomes Davy’s best friend.
Often laugh out loud funny, the piece showcases both actor’s talents superbly. They don’t miss a beat as they climb all over the scaffolding which makes up the sparse stage, joshing each other and playing practical jokes. The tales told are interesting and engaging although I did begin to look at my watch about an hour in to this 80 minute piece and wonder where we were going.
But we weren’t really going anywhere and it was the journey that was the thing, and a moving and humorous one it was too.
WHAT: The Boat Factory
WHERE: The King’s Head Theatre, Upper Street, Islington
WHEN: Until August 17
TICKETS: £15 – £25
RUNNING TIME: 80 minutes, no interval
FOR MORE INFO: https://kingsheadtheatre.ticketsolve.com/shows/873490532/events
WOULD I SEE IT AGAIN: No: been there, done that
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