Titanic (Scenes from the British Wreck Commissioner’s Inquiry, 1912)

Metropolitan Arts Centre, Belfast

Who isn’t familiar with the details? Built in a proud Belfast city on an impressive scale and at considerable expense, boasting the finest fittings and an awesome array of facilities, and buoyed with bright hopes for its maiden voyage, here is the story of the brand new Metropolitan Arts Centre.

That is has chosen to open with an absorbing dissection of the Titanic disaster during its centenary year may strike you as either opportunism or tempting fate, but playwright Owen McCafferty makes this verbatim theatre project both canny and courageous.

The problem with a subject as memorialised and sensationalised as the Titanic, director Charlotte Westenra’s production recognises, is that every vivid retelling somehow makes it feel more distant: from A Night to Remember to Titanic 3D. Instead, Westenra dispenses with the sensational aspects early, swallowing the violin strains of Nearer My God to Thee with a furious swell, then quietening into the introduction of an unassuming present day figure (Ian McElhinney): “I am a fictional character, by the way.”

McElhinney’s Clerk is oddly superfluous in a text created from real testimony within a production with a much more immersive agenda. Richard Kent’s immensely realistic set, a towering Westminster Hall, supported by James Kennedy’s atmospheric sound design, plunges the audience into the confusion, outrage and banal process of the aftermath where witnesses regard us nervously or imperiously. We have come for answers.

Significantly, though, this is not a trial. “Ask about facts!” Paul Moriarty’s Lord Mersey frequently cools the attorney general’s rhetorical drive or the doggedness of the third-class passenger’s representative. We want more, though – culpability, responsibility – and an excellent cast are in a similar position, plumbing their characters for deeper truths beneath the testimony.

McCafferty’s play is full of detail but deliberately short on comment, dwelling on the controversy of Lifeboat 1, which departed with just seven crew and five first-class passengers, and rowed away from the cries of the drowning: “A wail,” Jay Villiers’s Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon recalls, “one confused sound.” Gordon later paid each crewman £5, and the play, like the Inquiry, circles this incident as though it might bring clarity to it. The fascinating thing is that it still can’t.

Patrick O’Kane suggests a conflicted managing director Joseph Ismay, but can’t confirm his influence on the ship’s careless speed that day and the play concludes, surprisingly, by calling Sir Ernest Shackleton, an expert in ice (a pleasantly swaggering James Hillier). A figure famed for discovery invites a curious irony: the play shows just how many questions can never be answered. Its sobering finality is a catalogue of the 1,517 dead. Unlike other retellings, it does not seek to raise the wreck, but to raise doubts and fierce moral questions. That may be the most fascinating legacy of the Titanic, one that is still unsinkable.

Runs until May 20th