'Reykjavik' review — Richard Bean's elegiac, eerie drama about trawler fishermen is an unusual catch

Read our review of Reykjavik, directed by Emily Burns, now in performances at the Hampstead Theatre to 23 November.

Richard Bean returns to his thematic and geographic roots with Reykjavik, from the playwright best-known to this day for the brilliantly antic One Man, Two Guvnors, which brought James Corden to international attention. That show, rooted in commedia dell’arte, increasingly looks like an outlier in Bean’s ongoing, ever-adventuresome career.

The tone this time round is alternately elegiac and eerie, the setting Bean’s native Hull early in 1976 and, after the interval, the lobby/bar area of a hotel in the Icelandic capital at a time of psychic reckoning.

The first half, essentially a series of face-offs, takes us inside the offices of a distant-water trawling operation run by Donald Claxton (John Hollingworth). One of his ships has sunk, resulting in 15 dead and just a few survivors. As Claxton readies himself for the so-called “widows’ walk”, paying respects to the families of the deceased, he beats back various visitors.

Those range from his nattily dressed father, William (Paul Hickey), to Lizzie Jopling, the snarky wife of one of the five men who has survived the accident. Laura Elsworthy rather overeggs her performance as Lizzie, perhaps because she’s amongst the few in Emily Burns’s adroit production not to surface afresh after the half, when the play notably shifts tack (to use a seafaring image).

Newly arrived amongst the fisherman who have managed to see another day, Claxton has come to bring these five men home. “Are you the kind of bloke who would piss on my chips? If they was on fire?” asks the lippy Jack, played by Matthew Durkan, who is first seen before the interval as a reverend busily pondering notions of good and evil. (Only Bean could fold into such existential musings a corollary enquiry into bacon rinds.)

What ensues is a portrait in drink-fuelled commingling and community that put me in mind of Conor McPherson’s similarly structured The Weir.

Happy to pass the night in conversation prior to the taxis that will start the lads on their journeys home, the men succumb to reveries that are bawdy, sure, but also bleak. One minute, the talk turns to whether Alan Ladd ever exposed his genitalia on camera; the next, we’re reminded of a gallantry that comes from a Hull trawling brotherhood whose “bond of affiliation [is] stronger than chains”.

Urged into storytelling in sequence, the “four drunken cunts” comprise a moving portrait of grace under emotional pressure on the one hand, emblems of a now-vanished way of life the next, and if Reykjavik tends to play its actual drama close to the chest, the result certainly rewards the patience of those who can accommodate writing in which atmosphere comes before plot.

I’m not entirely persuaded by a first half that by play’s end seems essentially like an elaborate set-up: I’d be intrigued to see whether it might work entirely displaced to foreign climes and centred on characters at their most English when away from home. (The discussion as if on cue extends to the Icelandic tussle about banning foreign fishing vessels and the financial impact of that on the economy.)

The creative team amplifies as needed both the quotidian settings (Anna Reid is the ace designer) alongside the otherworldly rumblings that hover around proceedings, whether gently illuminated – literally so by Oliver Fenwick’s lighting – or given a voice (however muted) in Christopher Shutt’s sound design.

Hollingworth, meanwhile, presides over the play like an indrawn, quietly anguished boss who feels more than he can perhaps allow himself to let on. He lets feeling drip from him slowly, rendingly – in the same manner, in fact, as the play.

Reykjavik is at the Hampstead Theatre to 23 November. Book Reykjavik tickets on London Theatre.

Photo credit: Reykjavik (Photos by Mark Douet)