Djúpid (The Deep)

A monologue charting the fate of a doomed fisherman, delivered with heart-breaking sincerity by a superb actor, would likely make for haunting theatre at the best of times. However, lunchtime audiences watching this production in Glasgow when it was first performed had a particularly raw experience.

It was impossible to hear Graeme Maley’s translation of this work by Icelandic playwright Jon Atli Jonasson without thinking of the 16 men who lost their lives in the North Sea less than two weeks before. The reminders were almost constant: when the self-effacing young narrator asks one of his comrades whether there was time to issue a mayday call, it felt as though we already knew the answer.

Liam Brennan gives a tremendous performance, delivering what begins as a fairly mundane tale of a shy young man with modest ambitions in a booming voice that transforms him into the ‘big and heavy’ character who takes care not to wake his parents when he gets up to go to work, and is too shy to ask out the local girl he fancies.

The sinking of the fishing boat on which he works is foreshadowed by the gallows humour of the fishermen’s banter: one minute Brennan is dashing through a faithful yet somehow hilarious retelling of the ending of the film Titanic, the next he is evoking the experience of being a split second away from drowning.

The real horror is still to come, as he survives for long enough to consider in painful detail how his loved ones and those of his already drowned colleagues will suffer. When, in a dream-like conversation, he ponders his obligation to keep on fighting for his life and tells a mute witness, “I hope they never find our bodies,” it is almost too much to bear.