Reykjavik review: “brimful of humanity and grief”

Reykjavik

Hampstead Theatre | ★★★★★

If it is a well made play you are after you can’t really ask for more than Richard Bean’s latest. The first half is so well wrought it induces the kind of awe felt from seeing up-close a great piece of engineering. Then the second act does for Britain’s fishing industry what Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem does for West Country folklore.

We open in a dimly lit office that overlooks a Hull quay where trawler owner Donald Claxton (a superb John Hollingworth) counts his distant-water fishing boats out and counts them back. One recently went down off Iceland with the loss of 15 men. Yet the day-to-day business of running the firm goes on. This incudes firing an underperforming skipper and taking on the chin the barbs and brickbats from a community who see boat owners like Claxton as profiting from the risks taken by the town’s fishermen.

The play sees Bean return to the world of his 20-year-old hit Under The Whaleback which explored the work conditions and culture of deckhands. This play however is set entirely on dry land. The year is 1975 when Britain affirmed by a big majority its place as a member of the EU’s precursor, the EEC. Mention of this feels like a dig at Brexit, a decision made by a much slimmer margin. But politics is incidental to the two and a half hours of Emily Burns’s beautifully balanced production which is brimful of humanity, grief and chilling ghostly tales.

Looming ahead for Caxton is the ritual all trawler-owners have to undertake when one of their boats fatally sinks. Called “The Walk” the tradition demands that the boat’s owner walks to the home of each wife whose husband died. A high death toll means there is a lot of tea to drink, but “don’t ever take a piss in the house of a woman you’ve made a widow,” advises Caxton’s father who when he ran the family business did the walk a good few times himself.

What went down during Caxton’s daunting, haunting debut walk is revealed in the second act where the action shifts to the bar of a Reykjavik hotel. Here Caxton arrives like a fish of water, braving the resentments that deckhands have for their employers in order to help the survivors of the sinking get home. In this abstemious city rough, hard-to-get alcohol fuels the night.

This is a play that gives an overlooked part of our island nation’s culture its due. Its chilling lore runs like a riptide through the evening and taps on the shoulders its characters like an uninvited guest.