'The Boat Factory' by Dan Gordon, The Kings Head Theatre

‘The Boat Factory’ is an a elegy, ‘a love song’ that could only have come from a deep love of home and ancestry; a way of life as precious to the plays’ writer, Dan Gordon, as to his onstage counterpart and ‘The Boat Factory’s’ protagonist, Davy Gordon.

The plays’ theatrical fixtures are the epitome of stage symmetry and simplicity: two men, two crates and two scaffold structures are the only ingredients in producing thirty six characters, more than ten settings 

and a lifestyle long lost to the industrial expansion of air travel.

Davy (Dan Gordon), an apprentice joiner in the 1940s narrates his experience of the Belfast shipyard. What grows from his fast pace, oral autobiography is a sense of familiarity, belonging and acceptance. Davy’s language is an invitation to experience the pride and responsibility of living in Belfast during the height of the shipyards fame.

As young men, Davy and companion Geordie Kilpatrick (Michael Condron) dream about a life beyond their apprenticeships: lives full of the adventures of Flash Gordon and Moby Dick inspired encounters with white whales. Gordon’s narration reveals how, at the tender age of sixteen, a ‘trade for life’ was not just a safety net, but a prison, a feeling reinstated by the bare scaffolding of the plays’ setting. In the protagonists own words, the shipyards worker may be writers, philosophers, poets and activists, but when the docklands bell rings, they are all mere components of the boat factory.

Nonetheless, Davy’s imprisonment gives birth to the bonds, excitement and dangers of shipyard work. Above all - and certainly stirred by Herman Melville’s 1851 adventure novel - Gordon’s creation stirs up such a sense of community, that the ineffectuality of the young boy’s dreams is not discouraging.

At its strongest moments, the dynamic simplicity of setting and strength of acting immerses you completely in shipyard life. When Davy and Geordie watch the construction of Poseidon like vessels beneath them, their pride in being part of the process and team that creates them is emotive, tender and warm.

This is undoubtedly due to the quality of acting and interaction between Gordon and Condron, which is impeccable throughout. From two young childhood friends, to father and son and worker and boss, the pair successfully adopt their varying roles to every last facial detail and accent. You forget that you are presented with two actors creating multiple characters, and instead become absorbed in a circus of comic and heartfelt individuals who step in and out of Davy’s narrative, an achievement seemingly impossible for just two actors.

The play is punctuated by the fragmented descriptions of the screws and bolts used by joiners at this time. These dispersed monologues of technical information set a tempo for the play, a rhythm that promises to educate as well as entertain. Most significantly, these interruptions to Davy’s narrative inaugurate the quality of work shipyard men in Belfast were creating at this time, and the excitement of an evolving mechanical world.

In this way, Dan Gordon’s play is fragile, a journey comparable to an ocean liner, strong, well built but ultimately a reminder of mankind’s vulnerability to the machine world it creates. The plays message: ‘Don’t stand and wonder how to do it – do it and wonder how you did it’, leaves you in awe of the men and lifestyle it remembers. A lifestyle too often undermined, but justly celebrated in ‘The Boat Factory’.