I have spent some time this summer working on Project Titanic, my play about ...Titanic. I have done most of the research I need to do, especially in the texts of the American and British hearings that were held shortly after the disaster. Part of the challenge has been to try to isolate exactly what story or stories I want to tell, because there are so many individual stories contained within the Titanic saga -from conception right through to today. The most intriguing thing I have found is that everyone who becomes involved in Titanic becomes part of its history. Titanic the ship may have sunk, but Titanic the legend -the idea, lives on. And it is this that makes Titanic truly unsinkable. Somehow this particular ship and its story caught people's imagination and continues to do so. Why? Well, that is really the question I pose in my play. It is the phenomonan of Titanic that I am concerned with rather than the historical, facts and events. These have been addressed admirably in so many other works, and I have read a great many of them. Ideally I think the only way one could do full justice to every story contained within the history of Titanic would be to have a monologue by each and every person who has in some or any way been connected with the ship. But this would run to thousands of people. One must make a choice. My play has one key figure (J. Bruce Ismay) who survived the disaster (or did he?) and a small number of characters who didn't, and whose lives have particularly intrigued me. People often ask where my interest in Titanic comes from. A very good question. I think it probably started when I saw "A Night to Remember" at a very early age and was transfixed. (I saw it again a couple of weeks ago and was still transfixed.)
It must have been just after seeing that film that I wrote the account of Titanic posted above. I was thrilled to discover it a few days ago in an old school book. I am intrigued by the inaccuracies, but the narrative and terse presentation of key facts is not bad for a 7-year old!
