Richard Bean sails into familiar, yet new waters with his second play about the Hull distant water trawling fleet.
But where his 2002 Royal Court hit Under the Whaleback was set at sea, the action in Reykjavík very much takes place on dry land. Set in 1975, it’s also less focussed on the sailors, with its protagonist the trawler fleet owner Donald Claxton (John Hollingworth), Cambridge educated son to the fleet’s retired founder. He’s hardly what you’d call posh but an odd mix of sensitive and hard nosed, he is nonetheless largely disliked by his employees and viewed as a member of the boss class, plain and simple.
The naturalistic first half is set in Donald’s offices in Hull, with the company reeling from a recent sinking off the coast of Iceland. Over the course of the evening, Donald chats with ship captains, his dad, his young secretary, an angry local mother and a hipster priest. Bean is a writer of comedies, and there are some funny lines, but the Hull-set portion of Reykjavík is measured and nocturnal, and sympathetic towards Donald, who is in no way the bastard people seem to think he is. It’s really just him going about his job, though in the background lurks the aftermath of the disaster. There’s the imminent need for him to do something called the widows’ walk, where he travels through town on foot to visit the family of each man that died. And there’s also the matter of the five survivors, who are holed up in Reykjavík awaiting passage home.
Part two is a change of tone, pace and place as the action shifts to a hilariously hideous ‘70s hotel bar in the Icelandic capital (amazing work from designer Anna Reid) where the survivors are holed up, licking their wounds and – thanks to the country’s eccentric licensing laws – trying to get drunk off a horrible mix of non-alcoholic beer and some ghastly local spirit. There is a lot going on in this half, which kicks into gear when Donald wanders in fresh from the airport to see if he can help, to incredulity and varying levels of anger from the survivors. It’s a funnier and wilder section of the play, which culminates in a tense, Conor McPherson-alike round of ghost stories with Emily Burns’s poised production suggesting some window to the spirit world has been opened.
Ultimately Reykjavík is an elegy for the Hull deep sea fleets and a way of life that went with them, a version of Bean’s hometown that no longer exists. In the background, behind the ghosts and bickering, is the Icelandic parliament’s debate on whether to ban foreign fishing vessels from within 200 miles of their coast - a ban that would be passed, and send the local industry into terminal decline.
Not everyone is going to love the dabbling with the supernatural in the second half, or indeed the general departure from the measured realism of the Hull section. But I thought Reykjavík was veteran dramatist Bean’s best in a long time, an elegiac ‘serious comedy’ that manages to conjure up a sense of wonder both for the Hull fishing industry and in its way the ‘70s more generally – the bar’s horrible decor is as much a bewildering lost world as the fleets. And in a strong cast Hollingworth gives a great central performance as Donald - it’s rare to see a genuinely thoughtful and inquisitive portrait of a member of the boss class - I wonder if Bean was thinking of himself when he wrote the character, a man of working class Hull but fundamentally separated from it. Bean’s works are always strongest when there’s a sense of real emotional investment in them – not just mugging for laughs – and Reykjavik is as heartfelt a play as he’s made.